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Maurice Denis Quotes (1870-1943)
Writer, Artist, Painter
About Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis (25 November 1870 - 13 November 1943) was a French painter, decorative artist and writer, who was an important figure in the transitional period between Impressionism and modern art. Denis was associated with Les Nabis, then the French Symbolist movement with a return to neo-classicism.
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“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“..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.”
“To synthesize is not necessarily to simplify in the sense of suppressing certain parts of the object: it is to simplify in the sense of rendering intelligible. It is, in short, to put in hierarchic order: to set each picture to a single rhythm, to a dominant; it is sacrifice, to subordinate — to generalize.”
“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.”
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Maurice Denis on Abstract art
“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”
Maurice Denis on Fauvism
“When one enters the gallery devoted to their work [of the Fauve artists], at the sight of those landscapes, these figure studies, these simple designs, all of them violent in colour, one prepares to examine their intentions, to learn their theories; and one feels completely in the realm of abstraction.. ..here one finds, above all in the work of Matisse.. ..the act of pure painting.. .Everything which comes from our instinct and from nature, finally all the factors of representation and of feeling are excluded from the work of art..”
About Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis (25 November 1870 - 13 November 1943) was a French painter, decorative artist and writer, who was an important figure in the transitional period between Impressionism and modern art. Denis was associated with Les Nabis, then the French Symbolist movement with a return to neo-classicism.