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The Red Studio
Henri Matisse · Early Modern (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism)
- Artist
- Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
- Date
- 1911
- Dimensions
- 181 x 219.1 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States
The Red Studio shows the interior of Matisse's studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, but the walls, floor and furniture all dissolve into a single flat field of deep Venetian red. Only the artworks in the room, his own paintings, sculptures and ceramics, stand out in their real colours.
A closer look
The furniture, a table, a chair, a chest of drawers, a grandfather clock without hands, is drawn only as thin yellowish lines where the underlying paint shows through the red. The space becomes ambiguous: we cannot tell where the floor ends and the wall begins. What remains vivid are the works of art, as if the painting were a self-portrait of Matisse's creative world. By flooding the room with one colour, he made colour itself the structure of the picture, an idea that deeply influenced later abstract painters, including Mark Rothko.
History of the painting
Since Shchukin did not take it, Matisse kept the painting and sent it to two landmark exhibitions: the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912 and the Armory Show in New York, Chicago and Boston in 1913. In 1927 the English socialite David Tennant bought it to hang in the Gargoyle Club, his fashionable London nightclub, where it stayed for years before reaching New York.
