Henri Matisse Quotes

84 Sourced Quotes

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

Henri Matisse
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

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

Henri Matisse
Matisse: I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Interviewer: But if one hasn't always emotion. What then?
Matisse: Do not paint. When I came in here to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted.

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

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
I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.

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
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 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
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
When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

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
Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

Henri Matisse
I am forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed when, after successive modifications, the red has succeeded the green as the dominant color. I cannot copy nature in a servile way, I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture – when I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition

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. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I perceive instantly the sentiment which radiates from it and which is instinct in the composition in every line and color.

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
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
To give yourself completely to what you're doing while simultaneously watching yourself do it—that's the hardest of all for those who do work by instinct.

Henri Matisse
A painter has really no serious enemies like his bad paintings.

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

Henri Matisse
If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

Henri Matisse
A little while ago I took a nap under an olive tree, and the color harmonies I saw were so touching. It's like a paradise you have no right to analyze, but you are a painter, for God's sake! Nice is so beautiful! Alight so soft and tender, despite its brilliance.

Henri Matisse
The simplest means are those which best enable an artist to express himself. His means of expression must derive almost all of necessity from his temperament.

Henri Matisse
In a picture every part will be visible and will play the role conferred upon it, be it principal or secondary. All that is not useful in the picture is detrimental.

Henri Matisse
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Henri Matisse
We are born with the sensibility of a period of civilization. We are not masters of our production; it is imposed upon us.

Henri Matisse
[I wouldn't mind turning into] a vermilion goldfish.

Henri Matisse