Best 174 quotes of Henri Matisse on MyQuotes

Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.

A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.

A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.

A certain blue enters your soul

A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.

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.

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.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

An artist is an explorer.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

An artist must not feel under any constraint.

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.

An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.

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.

Another word for creativity is courage.

A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

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.

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.

Arrival = Prison, and the artist must never be a prisoner.

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

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.

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

A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you.

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

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

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

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

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

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

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions, I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

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

Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

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

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

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.

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.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

Exactitude is not truth. [Fr., L'exactitude n'est pas la verite.]

Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share.

Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.