Maurice Denis Quotes

Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

What amazement, followed by what a revelation! In place of windows opening on nature, like the impressionists, these were surfaces which were solidly decorative, powerfully colorful, bordered with brutal strokes, partitioned.

Art is no longer a purely visual experience.. ..it is a work of our intellect triggered by nature.. ..the imagination again become the queen of our strengths and we liberate our sensitivity.

Don't lose sight of the essential objectives of painting, which are expression, emotion, delectation; to understand the means, to paint decoratively, to exalt form and color.

The sublime is to approach the subject or wall with an attitude that is grand, noble, and in no way petty..

The profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves.. ..everything is contained in the beauty of the work.

Art remains a sure refuge, the hope of a reason in life from now on, and the consoling thought that little beauty manifests itself in our lives, and that we are continuing the work of Creation.. .Therefore the work of art has merit, inscribed in the marvelous beauty of flowers, of light, in the proportion of trees and shape of waves, and the perfection of faces; to inscribe our poor and lamentable life of suffering, of hope and of thought.

Painting is first of all the art of imitation, and not the servant of some imaginary 'purity'

Think of late paintings where Christ is the central figure.. .Remember the large mosaics of Rome. Reconcile the employment of large-scale decorative means and the direct emotions of nature.

..the classical aesthetic offers us at the same time a method of thinking and a method of wanting to be, a moral and at the same time a psychology.. .The classical tradition as a whole, by the logic of the effort and the greatness of results, is in some way parallel with the religious tradition of humanity.

I believe that art should sanctify nature.

Decorative and edifying. That is what I want art to be before anything else.

..Every work of art is a transposition,a caricature,the passionate equivalent of a sensation received.

Art is no longer a visual sensation that we gather, like a photograph, as it were, of nature. No, it is a creation of our spirit, for which nature is only the occasion.

The common error of us all [in late Impressionism] was to search above all for the light. It would have been better first to search for the Kingdom of God and his justice, that is to say for the expression of our spirit in beauty, and the rest would have arrived naturally.