The French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is one of the most beloved and frequently exhibited artists of the modern era. The short-lived Fauvism movement of which Matisse was a part believed that van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and the post-impressionists had shown a new way forward in painting, toward a freer, more daring use of color, and much of Matisse’s originality is constituted by the manner in which he carried the post-impressionists’ artistic innovations a further step forward. Whereas van Gogh and the post-impressionists broke from previous artistic traditions in using color not merely to represent objects in the world but in order to express one’s inner emotional state, Matisse and the Fauves favored even bolder, less representational, and even more expressive uses of color, distancing themselves even more than Gauguin and his cohorts did from the prior generation of impressionists and laying the groundwork for the entirely nonrepresentational artistic movement that became known as abstract expressionism. As Matisse stated: “Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate nature. It was given to us so that we can express our own emotions.”
Matisse’s commitment to color, even more so than to line or form, as the predominant structuring element of painting reached its apogee toward the middle of his life with his 1911 painting L’Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio), the subject of the Museum of Modern Art’s innovative exhibit “Matisse: The Red Studio,” on view now in New York through Sept. 10. Like movies that feature actors watching movies or novels in which characters read novels, the history of art has its share of paintings of paintings. The Red Studio fits firmly into this genre of paintings, with several key differences — many of which underline the factors that distinguished Matisse from previous generations of artists.
Standing at the intersection of the artistic genres of the painting within a painting and the self-portrait, The Red Studio is Matisse’s portrait of his own working studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb southwest of Paris where Matisse made his home before moving to Nice. Hanging on the walls, propped up against furniture, and lying on the floor of the garishly burnt-red studio are eleven of Matisse’s artworks. What are these paintings and sculptures, and why did Matisse choose them as the artworks he wished viewers to see in his studio? What do these paintings and their at-first haphazard-looking arrangement in his studio tell us about the artworks — and the artist? MoMA’s “Matisse: The Red Studio” brings all of these artworks together for the first time, along with The Red Studio from the museum’s permanent collection, in a way that allows us to enter not only the artist’s studio but also the life and mind of the artist.
One of the first paintings we see in the exhibit is a painting we might not notice in The Red Studio if there were not a curator highlighting its existence for us. Propped up against a stack of frames leaning against the studio’s back wall, it is a rather loosely delineated version of Matisse’s 1898 oil painting Corsica, the Old Mill, a work that is more impressionist in its representation of light, its visible brushstrokes, and its use of line and form than the Fauvist techniques that Matisse would later favor. Matisse, however, felt it important to include it in The Red Studio because it was during his trip to the island of Corsica with his wife that Matisse fell in love with the life and light of the southern Mediterranean. The painting thus functions as a kind of prolepsis for Matisse’s later relocation to southern France, a change of scenery from the colder climes of Paris that would allow him and his art to reach their fully mature form.
Somewhat more carefully delineated is his Nude with White Scarf (1909), which Matisse shows as hanging on the back wall of the studio directly above the stacks of frames against which Corsica, the Old Mill is leaning. Bringing together the actual paintings depicted in The Red Studio has the effect of making Matisse’s world less abstract for us museumgoers. We can see why the early 20th century art world considered him so radical. Today we know and love Matisse as the painter par excellence of joy, ease, bathers, and beauty, but during the beginning of the previous century, Matisse performed his version of épater le bourgeois by creating provocative works like Nude with White Scarf, in which we see a woman reclining against a pink and rose-red backdrop with a pensive expression on her rounded face, her right armed raised confidently above her short brown hair and, most outrageously, wearing absolutely nothing save for a light white scarf, which happens to be fortuitously placed just over her genitalia like a sheer linen fig leaf.
To the right of this nude is Young Sailor II (1906), one of the few clothed human figures in the nude-suffused Red Studio and a painting that may have been one of the turning points in Matisse’s artistic career. Although Matisse painted it with the kinds of bold, expressive, primary colors that would form such a core component of his fully developed artistic style, he painted this stout young man with clearer and more simplified lines. Matisse had a hard time selling it, a fact that may have led him to ponder altering his style to one that could appeal to more buyers, eventually leading to the full flourishing of his incipient Fauvism. The other paintings in The Red Studio on view at “Matisse: The Red Studio” include his 1907 illustration of nude goddesses (Le Luxe II), which also scandalized the prudish bien pensants of the Belle Époque; one of his early paintings of bathers, one of his favorite artistic subjects; two sculptures; and a painted ceramic plate, decorated, you guessed it, with an image of a female nude.
If you’re keeping score at home, this brings the total number of artworks displayed in “The Red Studio” to 10. If you’re wondering about the 11th, this would be the largest painting depicted in The Red Studio and the only painting that is not on view in the exhibit — yet another reclining female nude. It was not loaned to MoMA for this show only because it could not be — Matisse, taking a page from Franz Kafka, asked to have it destroyed after his death, and there was no Max Brod in his life to prevent its destruction. MoMA did, however, secure one of Matisse’s preparatory sketches for the painting from 1911.
Matisse painted several portraits of his studios during his life, but The Red Studio is the most well known, and most fascinating, of these studio portraits, likely on account of its ineffable qualities. For as many elements of the painting that we’re able to apprehend, there are just as many that seem to elude our grasp — the unearthly Venetian red that colors nearly the entirety of the canvas, the mystery of the unidentifiable objects above the dresser, the incongruous blue curtain at the far left of the canvas that appears to resemble the Argentinian flag. Although we can identify the paintings in The Red Studio, there remains a je ne sais quoi about the painting that we cannot quite fathom — and neither could the artist who painted it. “I like it,” Matisse said about his studio-portrait, “but I can’t explain it to you.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
