Frases de Henri Matisse

“Tenemos que ver toda la vida como si fuéramos niños.”

“La exactitud no es verdad.”

“Sin pasión no hay arte.”

“Una obra de arte debe ser armoniosa en su totalidad: cualquier detalle superfluo se debe sustituir por otro esencial.”

“Estudia, aprende, pero guarda un poco de ingenuidad. Tiene que estar dentro de ti, como el deseo de beber del borracho o el amor en el amante.”

“Una obra de arte debe llevar su significado completo en sí misma.”

“Me gustaría recuperar esa frescura de visión que es característica de la extrema juventud, cuando todo el mundo es nuevo para ella.”

“«Buscar la forma más enérgica de color posible, el contenido carece de importancia».<”

“Dibujar es como hacer un gesto expresivo con la ventaja de la permanencia.”

“El artista sólo ve verdades antiguas con una nueva luz, porque no hay nuevas verdades.”

“El jazz es ritmo y significado.”

“El trabajo cura todo.”

“No he sido más que un medio, por así decirlo.”

“Poco a poco he descubierto el secreto de mi arte. Se trata de la meditación sobre la naturaleza, en la expresión de un sueño que siempre está inspirado en la realidad.”

“El artista comienza con una visión, una operación creativa que requiere un esfuerzo. La creatividad requiere coraje.”

“El que ama, vuela, funciona y se regocija; está libre y nada lo detiene.”

“Es agradable ver cómo un buen poeta transporta la imaginación de otro artista, permitiéndole crear su propio equivalente de la poesía. El artista plástico, para sacar el mejor partido de su obra, debe evitar adherir de manera demasiado servil al texto. Por el contrario, debe trabajar libremente, enriqueciendo su propia sensibilidad mediante el contacto con el poeta que va a ilustrar.”

“No pinto cosas, sólo la diferencia entre las cosas.”

“… for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.”

“You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.”

“We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.”

“There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them”

“To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.”

“Nothing can be accomplished without love.”

“I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.”

“From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”

“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.”

“I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.”

“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.”

“Exactitude is not truth.”

“Rules have no existence outside of individuals: otherwise a good professor would be as great a genius as Racine.”

“For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.”

“A musician once said: 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. It is therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility: white, pure and candid with a mind as if empty, in a spiritual state analogous to that of a communicant approaching the Lord's Table. Obviously it is necessary to have all of one's experience behind one, but to preserve the freshness of one's instincts.”

“I have been no more than a medium, as it were.”

“Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o'clock, visit from Picasso. As I'm expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I'm doing this propaganda show [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1945] with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It's as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic.”

“I see with horror that the 'Salon Automne' is looming, for I haven't got, and shan't have, all I meant to be able to show there, the big stillife ['Harmony in Red'] has taken up so much of my time; but since I am content with the outcome, I tell myself one can't hope to be fast as well as good.”

“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.”

“Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.”

“Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format – I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different dimensions, for instance on a rectangular sheet.... a drawing must have a power of expansion which can bring to life the space which surrounds it.”

“At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness — I re-enter through the breach — and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again.”

“I try to condense the meaning of this body [of a woman] by drawing its essential lines. The charm will then become less apparent at first glance, but in the long run it will begin emanate from the new image. This image at the same time will be enriched by a wider meaning, a more comprehensively human one, while the charm, being less apparent, will not be its only characteristic. It will be merely one element in the general conception of the figure.”

“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.”

“What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.”

“I don't paint things. I only paint the differences between things.”