Matisse Quotes

Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. ~ Henri Matisse

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better. ~ Henri Matisse

I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture. ~ Henri Matisse

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting. ~ Henri Matisse

A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it. ~ Henri Matisse

You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush. ~ Henri Matisse

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ... ~ David Hockney

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. ~ Anselm Kiefer

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us. ~ Henri Matisse

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less. ~ Maya Angelou

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul ~ Henri Matisse

The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model. ~ Henri Matisse

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse. ~ Gary Hume

Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love. ~ Henri Matisse

I am made of all that I have seen. ~ Henri Matisse

To arrive is to be in prison. ~ Henri Matisse

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft. ~ Henri Matisse

To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought. ~ Henri Matisse

Drawing is ... not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods. ~ Henri Matisse

When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently. ~ Henri Matisse

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another ... ~ Henri Matisse

He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. ~ Henri Matisse

A certain blue enters your soul ~ Henri Matisse

A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability. ~ Henri Matisse

Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances. ~ Henri Matisse

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. ~ Henri Matisse

After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there. ~ Henri Matisse

Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away. ~ Helen Frankenthaler

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art. ~ Henri Matisse

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing. ~ Tim Burton

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~ Henri Matisse

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. ~ Henri Matisse

For whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions. ~ Henri Matisse

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery? ~ Henri Matisse

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. ~ Henri Matisse

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black. ~ Henri Matisse

Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary. ~ Henri Matisse

Don`t talk to me about Matisse
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.

Talk to me instead about the culture generally
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind. ~ Henri Matisse

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me. ~ Henri Matisse

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant. ~ Henri Matisse

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour ~ Henri Matisse

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open. ~ Henri Matisse

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it. ~ Henri Matisse

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language. ~ Henri Matisse

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

"According to Thomas Mann," Peter said, "'Great artists are great invalids. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces. ~ Henri Matisse

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra.
Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. ~ Henri Matisse

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition. ~ Henri Matisse

Drawing is putting a line around an idea. ~ Henri Matisse

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves. ~ Henri Matisse

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway. ~ Ravi Shankar

Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone. ~ Henri Matisse

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction. ~ Henri Matisse

All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone. ~ Henri Matisse

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage. ~ Henri Matisse

Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain. ~ Henri Matisse

I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. ~ Henri Matisse

My curves are not crazy. ~ Henri Matisse

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~ Henri Matisse

In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope. ~ Henri Matisse

The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention. ~ Henri Matisse

No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands ... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash. ~ Semir Zeki

The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling. ~ Henri Matisse

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. ~ Jacob Rothschild

You were a painting by Matisse, but you took sleeping pills. ~ Carole Maso

Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base ... He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us. ~ Henri Matisse

Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play. ~ Henri Matisse

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ... ~ Henri Matisse

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium. ~ Henri Matisse

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illumination the fog that surround ~ Henri Matisse

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues. ~ Don DeLillo

Sing, Muse, of high, molded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers! Sing of armchairs with scarlet upholstery and highboys lacquered like mirrors and the elegant shadows of potted palms! Sing of a chandelier made entirely of antlers! Of what looked to be a genuine Matisse on the wall above the hearth! ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty. ~ Henri Matisse

The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning ... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express. ~ Henri Matisse

Don't feel you have to buy something to sit in or at. Buy something you are emotionally attached to and build your design around that. One Matisse cutout poster could provide you with your whole color scheme! ~ Alexandra Stoddard

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. ~ Henri Matisse

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it. ~ Henri Matisse

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them. ~ Jean Cocteau

If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses. ~ Henri Matisse

When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise ... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed ... Starting to paint I felt gloriously free ... ~ Henri Matisse

When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, 'yes, when I'm working'. ~ Marion Woodman

The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance. ~ Henri Matisse

What I am after, above all, is expression. ~ Henri Matisse

All things considered, there is only Matisse. ~ Pablo Picasso

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements. ~ Henri Matisse

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation. ~ Henri Matisse

I have been no more than a medium, as it were. ~ Henri Matisse

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there. ~ Henri Matisse

The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to ... ~ Henri Matisse

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape: it is the human figure. ~ Henri Matisse

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave. ~ Henri Matisse

Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.' ~ Ellsworth Kelly

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artis ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance. ~ Henri Matisse

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression. ~ Henri Matisse

Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses. ~ Henri Matisse

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is. ~ Henri Matisse

Jazz is rhythm and meaning. ~ Henri Matisse