Henri Matisse Quotes

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I'm fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Comics, in a sense, the style, the images - it's almost like music. They say music is a universal language, but when the eyes behold something, a figure, somebody moving; it's real, and it cannot be denied.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.

Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Ayn Rand held that art is a 're-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.' By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.