256 Quotes by Henri Matisse

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

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

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

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.

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.

Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.

It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else

Never ruin a good painting with the truth.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.