Quotes & Sayings About Art 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

Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it. Henri Matisse — Volkmar Essers

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

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

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

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

Art is an escape from reality. — Henri Matisse

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America. — Henri Matisse

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us. — Henri Matisse

People in coats and ties were milling around the Talley gallery, and on the wall were the minimally rendered still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, most of them no bigger than a tea tray. Their thin browns, ashy grays, and muted blues made people speak softly to one another, as if a shouted word might curdle one of the paintings and ruin it. Bottles, carafes, and ceramic whatnots sat in his paintings like small animals huddling for warmth, and these shy pictures could easily hang next to a Picasso or Matisse without feeling inferior. — Steve Martin

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

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. — 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

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

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist. — Henri Matisse

What I dream of is an art of balance. — Henri Matisse

All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone. — 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

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. — Henri Matisse

I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so. — Henri Matisse

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky. — Henri Matisse

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

Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger ... and more concentrated. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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 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

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting. — Henri Matisse

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

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next. — Anthony Caro

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

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

I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair. — Henri Matisse

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject. — Henri Matisse

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

All art worthy of the name is religious. — 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

Seek the strongest color effect possible ... the content is of no importance. — Henri Matisse

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed. — Henri Matisse

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 ... — Henri Matisse

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

Creativity takes courage. — Henri Matisse

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

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else. — Henri Matisse

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony. — Henri Matisse

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