Matisse: The Red Studio: Great Art Explained

Today, Henri Matisse's The Red Studio is considered one of the landmarks of modern art, seen by thousands of visitors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But before arriving there in 1948, it spent more than a decade hanging in a London nightclub. When Matisse painted The Red Studio in 1911, it was one of the strangest pictures anyone had ever seen. A room almost completely consumed by red. furniture reduced to outlines, paintings hanging on walls that barely seem to exist, and a grandfather clock with 12 numbers but no hands. Even Matisse wasn't entirely sure what he had created. The painting seemed to break almost every established rule of western painting. Perspective collapses, objects lose their solidity, and the distinction between floor and wall almost disappears. Color is no longer used simply to describe the world, but becomes a world in and of itself. Matisse had stumbled upon a new kind of freedom in painting, one that would eventually help liberate generations of artists. The problem was nobody wanted to buy it. The painting traveled to exhibitions in London, Chicago, Boston and New York, including the famous Armory show of 1913, without finding a buyer. Matisse eventually withdrew it from view and kept it largely out of sight for more than a decade. Then in the 1920s one of the paintings that would come to define modern art found an unlikely new home hanging on the wall of a fashionable London nightclub frequented by the so-called bright young things. So how did a painting that even its creator struggle to understand go from rejection and obscurity to becoming a masterpiece of modern art. And what was it doing in a London nightclub in the first place? To understand why the Red Studio became so influential, we need to return to the world in which it was painted. It emerged at a moment when many of the old certainties about how the world worked and how it should be represented were beginning to unravel. By 1911, Europe seemed to be accelerating into the modern age. Airplanes had taken to the skies, automobiles filled city streets, electric lighting transformed the night, cinema was becoming a mass medium, and Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize. Even our understanding of reality was changing. Freud's theories of the unconscious raised unsettling questions about how well we understand our own minds, while Einstein's work on relativity challenged conventional ideas about space and time. Paris stood at the center of this rapidly changing culture, and artists were responding with radical ideas of their own. Through cubism, Picasso and Braque were dismantling the conventions of Renaissance perspective, while others questioned a basic assumption of Western art, that a painting should reproduce the visible world. Against this backdrop of extraordinary technological, scientific and artistic change, Matisse painted the Red Studio, challenging our perception of space with a radical vision that matched the upheaval around him. Before Matisse became one of the great revolutionaries of modern art, he seemed destined for a thoroughly bourgeois life. Born in 1869 in northern France, Matisse had a comfortable middle-class upbringing and unlike his great rival Picasso, showed no signs of being an artistic prodigy. He studied law and by 19 was working as a lawyer's clerk. Then in 1890 at 21, appendicitis confined him to bed for several months and to pass the time his mother gave him a box of crayons and some paints. Matisse later described the experience as discovering a kind of paradise. He abandoned law and moved to Paris to study art, but it would take a long time before he found his own artistic voice. As was standard in art schools at the time, he spent hours in the Louvre copying old masters, particularly Jean-Simeon Chardin, and his style remained surprisingly conventional for many years. But eventually he studied under the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, who encouraged him to learn from the past while experimenting freely, teaching him that colours should be thought, dreamed and imagined, laying the groundwork for Matisse's increasingly adventurous use of colour. New influences arrived from everywhere. In Brittany, the Australian painter John Russell introduced him more deeply to Impressionism. On his honeymoon in London with his wife Amélie, Matisse saw Turner's paintings and was astonished by his handling of light and colour. And in Corsica, the intense Mediterranean light opened his eyes further to the possibilities of colour. Cézanne became another crucial influence. In 1899, despite struggling financially, Matisse bought this painting, which he would keep for nearly 40 years. Cezanne taught him that painting could be constructed through colour and form, rather than simply reproducing what the eye could see. By now, Matisse also had a family to support. He was raising his daughter Marguerite from an earlier relationship, and after marrying Amélie in 1898, they had two sons, Jean and Pierre. Money was tight, and Matisse sometimes took decorative work simply to make ends meet. While he had found his true vocation, making a living from it would prove much more difficult. In 1905, Matisse's experiments with colour became a public scandal. At the Salon d'Automne in Paris, he exhibited alongside André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, amongst others. Their fierce colours and bold brushwork provoked outrage. To a hostile public, these paintings were an insult to everything that made art respectable. One critic described the artist as les fauves or the wild beasts. Matisse and his peers proudly co-opted the critical insult as a badge of honour. And so began the Fauvist movement, making Matisse and his fellow Fauves as both visionaries and disruptors, pushing the boundaries of art to its limits. Looking at Matisse's paintings from that salon, it is easy to see what caused the fuss. Here a green stripe runs straight down his wife's forehead and nose. Colour could now shape a face, divide a canvas and convey emotion. And in this painting, which viewers accused of being unfinished, patches of green, pink and yellow cut across Amélie's face. The art critic Leo Stein called the painting the nastiest smear of paint he had ever seen, before acquiring it with his sister Gertrude a few days later. But Matisse was always pushing, always experimenting, and a trip to Algeria in 1906 strengthened his interest in textiles and decorative pattern, part of a growing fascination with Islamic art. Now Matisse began to rethink the space of the painting itself, experiments that would eventually lead him to the Red Studio. For years Matisse struggled to support his young family through painting. Critics continued to ridicule his work, and his father still disapproved of his decision to abandon law for art. Amélie's earnings as a milliner helped keep them afloat, while only a handful of collectors bought his paintings. One was Sergei Shchukin, a Russian textile magnate who was building up a vast collection of modern art. His support would transform the career of Matisse. In 1908, Shchukin commissioned a predominantly blue painting for his Moscow dining room, similar to this one he had already bought in Paris. The commission offered Matisse much-needed income, and with it, an opportunity to develop his ideas further. But before sending the painting, then known as Harmony in Blue, to Moscow, Matisse made a bold decision. In A Sign of Things to Come, he painted over the blue with a deep, vibrant red. The work then became Harmony in Red. Shukin accepted the change. His willingness to trust Matisse's judgement would help make increasingly ambitious experiments possible. In 1909, he commissioned the monumental paintings Dance and Music. That same year, thanks to Shukin, Matisse and his family moved to a house where he had a studio built in the grounds. After years of financial uncertainty, he had greater security, and a space designed for his work. Two years later, he would make that studio the subject of another painting intended for Shukin. This time, his patrons' trust would meet its limit. In 1911, Shchukin commissioned three large paintings for a small room in his Moscow mansion, leaving the subjects entirely to Matisse. The work dominated Henri and Amélie's year. Matisse felt the pressure intensely, and Amélie, as always, supported him through periods of anxiety. The first painting he produced was the Pink Studio. It belongs to a long tradition of artists depicting their working spaces, from Vermeer's The Art of Painting to Courbet's The Artist's Studio. Here, however, the artist, Matisse himself, is absent. His surroundings and artworks speak for him. He had painted a studio interior before, during a period of severe financial hardship. Seen together, the two interiors suggest how much his circumstances had changed. The earlier room feels cramped and sombre, while the pink studio offers light, space and a sense of possibilities. At 41, Matisse had already made some of his most important works, but the freedom that came with financial security was still new. Shchukin's support had helped make that possible. After delivering the pink studio for the second part of his commission, Matisse would soon paint the studio again from a slightly different viewpoint. This time however, he would transform more than the view. The red studio would push his painting further than even his most adventurous patron was prepared to follow. Schuchin would reject the painting. At almost six feet tall and more than seven feet wide, the Red Studio is an immersive experience. Seen close up, its red seems to extend beyond the canvas. Paintings, sculptures, furniture and objects are scattered around the studio space. Everything we see in the painting existed in Matisse's studio. The objects still exist in museums all around the world. Eleven works of art, six pieces of furniture and a variety of objects all all exist in this strange red world. It is, as I said, another view of his studio, looking to the left of the part we see in the pink studio, with a section in the middle that overlaps, showing, as we see here, the same painting on the same section of wall. Two similar views, two completely different paintings. The table tilts towards us. Pictures lean against walls that almost disappear. Chairs and cupboards lose their solidity, becoming delicate outlines within the red. There are clues to depth, but every time we begin to understand the room, its flat surface interrupts the illusion. We can't remain passive as viewers. We find ourselves trying to reconstruct the space. Where does the floor meet the wall? Where would the ceiling begin? How are those pictures supported? And how could we tell the time on a clock without hands? Matisse gives us just enough information to imagine a room, then makes us question how we have put it together. Starting at the bottom left, which reads like a still life, we get a ceramic plate that sits next to a wine glass. That glass offers a small but useful anchor. We know roughly how large a wine glass is. Instinctively, we can use it to judge the dimensions of the table and the room beyond. beyond. One familiar object helps us establish a scale within this uncertain space. To the right of the wine glass, nasturtium leaves tumble out of a tall vessel, curling around a small sculpture. In front of this we see a box of pencils or blending stumps, with two already out, unused but ready to use, recalling those colour crayons he picked up in a hospital for the first time at 21 years old. There is also a small pot of paintbrushes which along with the crayons signify the artist and the creative process. Although there are no signs of interrupted work, no prominent easel and no palette. Drawing materials sit within reach but the room feels more like a carefully arranged exhibition than a busy workshop. The artist is physically absent and the empty chair emphasizes this. Matisse once said to a friend the whole of an artist is in his work and here he is showing us the works through which he had developed his ideas over time. In that sense we could say it is a self-portrait. At the far left what looks like a curtained window is in all likelihood this entrance door to the studio which Matisse paints with no view of the outside world. Windows and paintings often invites similar questions in Matisse's work. Are we looking through an opening or at a colored surface? In this painting the pictures scattered around the studio offer glimpses of bodies and landscapes while the actual window view can't be seen. The artworks become our opening into other worlds. This freedom with space belongs to a wider change in European art. As Japan opened more extensively to international trade in the 19th century Japanese prints circulated increasingly in Europe. Their unexpected viewpoints, cropped forms and expanses of color offered alternatives to conventional Western perspective. European artists discovered that a picture could feel complete without presenting a single orderly view through depth. That history offers a useful context for the Red Studio where a surface can remain visibly flat while at the same time suggesting a world which we want to enter. If we continue around the room, Matisse has placed large nude against the wall. Only an old photo of it exists, as the artist asked for it to be destroyed after his death. We don't know why. To the right of that is nude with a white scarf, and on the floor below is the small landscape, Corsica the Old Mill, which adds a note of autobiography, representing an earlier stage of his career and his discovery of Mediterranean light that would be crucial to his work. At the center stands a grandfather clock, the tallest object in the room. Its face has hour markers but no hands. We recognize a clock but cannot tell the time, just as we recognize a room but struggle to measure its depth. In the Red Studio, time becomes as abstract as space. The red walls and prominent clock invite comparison with Van Gogh's The Night Cafe, a painting Matisse knew well. But where Van Gogh's exaggerated perspective creates unease, and his clock marks the late hour, the Red Studio seems to slip free of measurable space and time. Above the chest of drawers hangs a strip of patterned textile, a reminder of the artist's lifelong love of fabrics. Raised in the textile region of northern France, he collected cloth throughout his career, drawing inspiration from its colours and patterns. That fascination continued into his late cutouts, where he used scissors and coloured paper to create the decorative rhythms that had always animated his paintings. Our eyes continue to be led around the painting, from Young Sailor Two towards the greens and pinks of Cyclamen. Then leaning against the chest of drawers is Bathers and in the far right we find his painting Le Luxe Two, a painting that would travel to England in 1912 for an exhibition along with the Red Studio where it was not well received. The real sculptures have been altered, reshaped or even changed colour to keep the monochromatic balance of the overall work. For Matisse, these were deeply familiar surroundings. This was where he worked, reconsidered decisions and lived with his paintings and sculptures. The studio contained objects and images that mattered to him and in this painting they coexist within a single space. We can read it as a personal world, shaped by memory and attachment as much as by architecture. Its emotional character helps explain why the red matters so much. Matisse was painting a place he knew intimately and searching for a color that could hold his experience of it together. Yet that color came surprisingly late. Technical analysis in the early 2020s revealed that the red studio originally looked very different. The walls were blue, the floor was pink, the furniture was painted in solid ochre and green lines defined the paneling. Like his earlier painting, The Pink Studio, it was a much more conventional interior with recognizable walls, floors and furniture. The fact there was a painting underneath this painting was only discovered when conservators removed the painting from its frame and they discovered traces of these earlier colors along the edge of the canvas. They believed the original color scheme was blue for the walls, pink for the floor, green lines for the paneling and furniture was painted in solid ochre. Further examination confirmed that much of the original composition was still there, hidden beneath the red. Matisse had apparently finished the painting and it was sitting in his studio drying awaiting delivery to Moscow. Then before he sent it to Shukin, he made an extraordinary decision. He picked up his brush and began covering the blue walls, pink floor and ochre furniture in deep Venetian red, eventually covering roughly two-thirds of the canvas. For an artist to take a completed painting and transform it so dramatically was an enormous gamble. And technical photographs suggest that Matisse applied the red remarkably quickly, perhaps before he even had time to reconsider. He left most of the artworks untouched but covered almost everything around them. And if you look closely you can still see evidence of the original painting. Flashes of the blue walls appear beneath the red, along with traces of ochre on the outlines and the pink floorboards underneath. There are even drips of the earlier colours still visible on the canvas. It really is a painting inside a painting. As the red spread across the canvas, the room began to lose its depth. Walls and floor merged. Furniture seemed to float and the familiar rules of perspective gave way. The delicate lines are what give the objects their shape and definition. An approach influenced by Cézanne, who had shown that color alone could create form and structure without relying on conventional outlines. What I find particularly fascinating is that Matisse allowed traces of his earlier decisions to become part of the finished work. We can almost reconstruct the process following the artist as he reconsidered the composition and discovered new possibilities. And this is one of the great pleasures of looking closely at the Red Studio. A painting that appears so simple and spontaneous was actually the result of considerable experimentation and an extraordinary decision to begin again. What looked so effortless was anything but. The Red Studio, like much of Matisse's work, was met with incomprehension and scorn. But what once seemed strange would eventually be recognized as revolutionary. Matisse had painted a room but in doing so he had begun to dismantle the very idea of pictorial space. The painting is powerful because it refuses to resolve itself. We recognize the objects, many of which still exist, yet the flat color and absence of conventional perspective make the room feel strangely detached from reality. It challenges our expectation of what a painting should be, and I love that. This tension between representation and abstraction is central to its importance in art history. Its vast expanse of red and flattened space would influence later generations of abstract painters. Artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Lee Krasner pushed further towards paintings in which colour, shape and scale became the primary means of expression. But I think its legacy goes beyond abstract expressionism. Throughout his career, Matisse looked for new ways of seeing. He learned from Cézanne, Impressionism and Fauvism, but also from the intricate patterns of Islamic art, the decorative rhythms of textiles and the flattened spaces of Russian icons, where figures and objects seem to float against flat fields of colour. He absorbed all these influences and transformed them into something uniquely his own. The Red Studio is a painting of a room but also a painting about painting itself, about colour, space, experimentation and risk, and above all the freedom to see the world differently.