Henri Matisse Quotes

84 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Henri Matisse
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.

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

Henri Matisse
I shan't get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.

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

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

Henri Matisse
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

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 residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.

Henri Matisse
The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.

Henri Matisse
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.

Henri Matisse
To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will only be inspired by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter.

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

Henri Matisse
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. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator.

Henri Matisse
For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning.

Henri Matisse
I simply put down colours which render my sensation.

Henri Matisse
My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience. I… …merely try to find a color that will fit my sensation. There is an impelling proportion of tones that can induce me to change the shape of a figure or to transform my composition. Until I have achieved this proportion in all the parts of the composition I strive towards it and keep on working. Then a moment comes when every part has found its definite relationship, and from then on it would be impossible for me to add a stroke to my picture without having to paint it all over again.

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

Henri Matisse
The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my colors without a preconceived plan. If at the first step and perhaps without my being conscious of it one tone has particularly pleased me, more often then not when the picture is finished, I will notice that I have respected this tone while I have progressively altered and transformed the others. I discover the quality of colors in a purely instinctive way.

Henri Matisse
I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting.

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

Henri Matisse
The future painter must feel what is useful for his development – drawing or even sculpture everything that will let him become one with Nature, identify himself with her, by entering into the things – which is what I call Nature – that arouse his feelings. I believe study by means of drawing is most essential. If drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses, you must draw first, to cultivate the spirit and to be able to lead color into spiritual paths.

Henri Matisse
What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that, my ambition being limited, I am unable to proceed beyond a purely visual satisfaction such as can be procured from the mere sight of a picture. But the purpose of a painter must not be conceived as separate from his pictorial means, and these pictorial means must be the more complete (I do not mean complicated) the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

Henri Matisse
Expression, to my way of thinking, does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions – everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings

Henri Matisse
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

Henri Matisse
Delacroix's composition is more entirely created, while that of Seurat employs matter organized scientifically, reproducing, presenting t our eyes objects constructed by scientific means rather than by signs, coming from our feeling. As result there is in his works a positivism, a slightly inert stability, coming from his composition, which is not the result of a creation of the mind, but of a juxtaposition of the objects. It is necessary to cross this barrier to re-feel light, colored and soft, and pure, the noblest pleasure

Henri Matisse
Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o'clock, visit from Picasso. As I'm expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I'm doing this propaganda show [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1945] with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It's as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic.

Henri Matisse
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman was well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse