Henri Matisse Quotes

[Albert] Hoxie, my Western Civilization professor. I had him in my freshman year and he opened up an extraordinary world to me that I've never forgotten. He used his extensive knowledge of art history to illustrate the development of Western culture and politics.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form

There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

Do you know what's most interesting? Working with the very strong restrictions of the institution. In the Renaissance, the aristocrats would order paintings from the artist. They would order the Crucifixion of Jesus. The restrictions were amazing. Jesus had to be in the middle, three apostles on the left, four apostles on the right - and still you had masterpieces. It's really interesting to work within restriction, and see what you can do with restriction.

The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.

The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.

I hope I will always have the ability to create art and live in a world where I can speak freely, and I can inspire people. I don't know what form that will take.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

Their 'magic' is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations.

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.