“A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.”
More from Henri Matisse on Art
“The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.”
“Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.”
“Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.”
“I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.”
John Keats
10 quotes“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other peop...”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
Ansel Adams
7 quotes“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful...”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”