“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.”

— Maurice Denis

1890 - 1920

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat sur…" by Maurice Denis?

Maurice Denis photo

Maurice Denis 17

French painter 1870–1943

Related quotes

“I think that for me any picture that works even if it is in the guise of pure color application, if it works, involved drawing. That is falt space on a flat surface. And for me, and I always say this, whether it's a Titian or a [Kenneth] Noland, the ones that come off work in that depth and the color perhaps it is divine and the thing that makes it work, but it is line color. If it doesn't work then it's decorative or dead or just applied colors on a surface. That's what wallpaper is. And that's the difference between the striped wallpaper and a great Noland.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about drawing in a picture
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I'm working or after I think it's finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman, Pollock, Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way.... in my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense..”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Source: 1960s, Interview with Henry Geldzahler', in 'Artforum', 1965, p. 37

“That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be.”

Percival Lowell book Mars and its Canals

Source: Mars and its Canals (1906), Chapter XXXII, Conclusion

“Serious color studies of nudes and heads. Only as practice and first training. Very strict determination of color values through water color. On top of it, some oils, simply for blending. The results are quite unattractive, little of importance to be hoped for here. This month of February is devoted to color. I painted many nudes from nature and even the portrait of a head, my syster's!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1903), # 485, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

“Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: Managers Not MBAs (2005), p. 362

“There must be no more pictures covered in brown sauce [c. 1880, when Munch started to paint series of landscapes in fresh colors]”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a written note; as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 41
after 1930

“Time' has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to... It is impossible to take it all-in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

Quote in Macke's letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

“Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Source: What Is Life?

“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

Source: No Name in the Street

“When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Related topics