In May, my friend Diana and I decided to pay a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to see an interesting Matisse show. It was based on his 1911 painting The Red Studio (L’Atelier rouge), a painting of his actual workspace in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb southwest of Paris.
In The Red Studio are several other paintings hanging on the walls—paintings of paintings—and several other works of art. (Does that make it meta-painting?)
MoMA has gathered all the paintings-in-the-painting together, along with the other pieces, and is exhibiting them as a show called Matisse: The Red Studio (1 May-10 September 2022).
Since I liked the Matisse artworks I’d seen anyway, it sounded like a fun show. So, Diana and I met at MoMA on Wednesday, 31 September. I’m sorry to report that I found it a disappointing show.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954), a French painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, lived and worked in Issy-les-Moulineaux from 1909 to 1917. He painted The Red Studio, “known as a foundational work of modern art and a landmark in the centuries-long tradition of studio painting” in the words of MoMA, in the fall of 1911.
In the six-foot-tall-by-seven-foot-wide painting are seven of Matisse’s other paintings, including innovative works like Le Luxe II (1907-08) to less well-known works, such as Corsica, The Old Mill (1898). The exhibit, which includes The Red Studio, will bring together this work with the surviving six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic by Matisse depicted on its canvas.
The seventh painting, Large Nude (Grand nu à la Colle, 1911) was destroyed after the artist’s death at his request because he considered it unfinished. It was a portrait of the artist’s daughter, Marguerite Matisse–later Duthuit, 1894-1982—when she was about 17. Apparently, at the turn of the 20th century, a young woman posing nude for her father wasn’t considered disconcerting.
(Marguerite posed for many of her father’s paintings; in fact, she was his most frequent model. Large Nude, however, exists today only in black-and-white photographs and the image in The Red Studio and the watercolor copy [now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow] Matisse sent to Sergei Shchukin, 1854-1936, the patron who commissioned it.
(One further comment on Large Nude: the name of Matisse’s daughter Marguerite is also the French word for daisy, the flower. Daisy images are featured in many of the paintings of Marguerite, such as the background of Large Nude—visible in The Red Studio—and on the dress she wears in The Painter’s Family, 1911, also commissioned by Shchukin.)
The Red Studio and the artworks depicted in it were assembled in one of the Robert B. Menschel Galleries on the third floor for their first reunion, according to the museum’s publicity materials, since they were together in Matisse’s studio at the time The Red Studio was made.
(I find a discrepancy here that I haven’t been able to resolve. In another of the Menschel Galleries, a wall panel noted that the art from the Issy-les-Moulineaux studio traveled to London with Matisse when he showed them, along with The Red Studio [when it was still called Red Panel or Panneau rouge], at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition there in 1912. Perhaps, since the works came from and returned to the studio without being scattered to the four winds, they weren’t seen as being “reunited” until Matisse: The Red Studio. Of course, that’s just my guess based on a parsing of the museum’s hype.)
In another gallery of the show, paintings and drawings related to The Red Studio attempted to illustrate the history of the painting, including its rejection by the wealthy Russian textile merchant Shchukin; its international travels; and its eventual acquisition by MoMA in 1949. “We’re reconstructing every move that led to the creation of that painting,” said Dorthe Aagesen, one of the organizers of Matisse: The Red Studio.
In what the New York Times called “a marvel of detective work,” the exhibit was organized by Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, and Aagesen, Chief Curator and Senior Researcher at SMK (Statens Museum for Kunst), the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen; with the collaboration of Georges Matisse (the artist’s great-grandson) and Anne Théry, curators of the Archives Henri Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineaux (in the house that once contained the workshop of the artist).
Following its presentation at MoMA, Matisse: The Red Studio will travel to SMK for display from 13 October 2022 through 26 February 2023.
Now, let me address a couple of personal disappointments that may give readers a clue about where I’m coming from when I say I was disappointed in this show. First, I said earlier that I liked the Matisse art that I’d seen before, so I looked forward to seeing Matisse: The Red Studio.
I’m from Washington, D.C., see—as many ROTters might have guessed. When I was young and lived there and then later, after I settled in New York City and returned often to visit my parents until their deaths, I often went to one or another of the District area’s art museums, of which, I imagine most of you know, there are dozens.
Among my favorite galleries—one of quite a few, actually—was the Matisse cut-outs, which I visited nearly every time I went to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, which was often. They were in one of the tower rooms above the main galleries and I loved just to look at them. They were like wonderful children’s art, except not.
I don’t remember seeing a solo exhibit of Matisse’s paintings anywhere until last month, though. I saw many of his canvases individually among other art, of course, and I especially remember paintings like Icarus (1947; MoMA) and Dance I (1909; MoMA), and sculptures such as Reclining Nude II (1927; Metropolitan Museum of Art), a small bronze. Apparently, I was spoiled and didn’t know it.
Second, I said I thought the MoMA show would be fun. I figured the reuniting of the art in The Red Studio was really just a curator’s excuse for mounting a Matisse exhibit in the same way I thought that Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at MoMA in 2008-09 was a (silly) excuse to put together a Van Gogh show (reported as part of “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” 12 October 2016). The curatorial rationale was just a blind, I figured.
Well, it wasn’t so much. First of all, the supporting art, the pieces that were promoted as informative background and illustrations of the techniques and concepts the experts posit are what Matisse was up to in The Red Studio, was way too inside-baseball for my interest.
Do I really need to know that Matisse invented the Venetian red he used for the walls of his studio in the painting? Or that he was working on making the outer painting (that is, the studio itself) as well as the paintings-in-the-painting flatter than a 2-D canvas is anyway? Really? Does that help me appreciate the art more? I don’t think so!
Where I could even understand the explanatory material—that is, the wall panels—it was pretty much TMI. It seemed like so much padding—to fill out the galleries beyond the six paintings, three sculptures, and one hand-painted dish. That wouldn’t make a museum show—it’s a display window.
I’ve admitted before that my enjoyment of art isn’t tied to the artists’ techniques or their observance of some principles of art. I’m not an artist and I never took an art class. (My companion Diana, who is an amateur painter and has been a serious art student, gets into that stuff.) I go with my gut. If looking at a piece of art excites me, or makes me smile, or moves me, that’s all I’m looking for.
Second of all, I was saddened to find that even the main art, the pieces that are in The Red Studio, were mostly uninteresting to me. I couldn’t get into them much. A few pieces, if I may fall back on how my mother and I used to judge art we liked, were worth coming back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip (Le Luxe II and maybe Bathers, 1907; oh, and Decorative Figure, 1908, a two-foot-tall bronze).
Matisse and his family—daughter, Marguerite (born to his model before he married his wife in 1898); wife, Amélie (Parayre) Matisse (1872-1958); sons, Jean (1899-1976) and Pierre (1900-89)—moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1909, to a house surrounded by a garden. On an adjoining property, he built a workshop (since demolished), custom-designed for making his art. (The Matisses lived there until 1917, when he went to live in southern France.)
Aside from The Red Studio, the artist made another painting of his workroom: The Pink Studio, also from 1911. This work, seen in illustrations in the MoMA exhibit, is at the Pushkin Museum. My only point in bringing it up here is to show that the Issy-les-Moulineaux studio isn’t actually red.
Following on his Fauvist period (1900-05), Matisse continued to paint in bold colors that weren’t necessarily part of his subjects’ natures. He chose the colors, such as the Venetian red of The Red Studio and the soft, vibrant pink of The Pink Studio, for artistic and emotive reasons, not representational ones.
(Fauvism is a style of painting in the first decade of the 20th century, of which Matisse was a founding proponent, that emphasized strong, vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes that didn’t correspond to the way things appeared in real life. When the Fauvists’ paintings were exhibited in 1905, a critic derisively described the works—with their expressive and non-naturalistic palette—as the product of fauves, French for ‘wild beasts.’)
In an earlier version of the studio painting, Matisse depicted it as a blue-grey interior with a pink floor and yellow furniture. He overpainted it in the Venetian red, except the artworks in the studio. The walls of the artist’s workroom were actually white.
Quite by accident, Diana and I viewed Matisse: The Red Studio starting with the supporting exhibit. The entrance to the Menschel Galleries is between the two rooms and we went right into the gallery displaying paintings and drawings closely related to The Red Studio intended to illuminate the picture’s history.
In an introductory panel outside the exhibit, the curators informed us that Matisse was “a highly controversial figure” at the time he painted The Red Studio and that poet, playwright, and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) named the artist “as among the ‘most disparaged’ artists of the time.” This was news to me!
Of the painting itself, the panel stated it had been greeted with “inscrutability and rejection.” Though today The Red Studio is considered “one of the most renowned and influential landmarks of modern art,” the curators described it as “one of the most complex experiments of his career, a monochrome-but-not, flat-yet-deep composition that served as a proving ground for [Matisse’s] radical rethinking of modern painting.”
These were clues to the negative rep under which Temkin and Aagesen asserted Matisse suffered. But what had he actually done to warrant such opprobrium? Matisse: The Red Studio’s second gallery (which Diana and I entered first), was an effort to explain these statements. As I reported earlier, I found the attempt overfilled with details that went mostly over my head.
Among the materials in this display, alongside paintings that illustrated aspects of innovative painting techniques Matisse used in The Red Studio, were artifacts and documents, such as archival photographs and letters. There was also a section, on video in a separate room off the gallery, on the science of conservation and new findings on the process of creating the painting.
Another section of this gallery was devoted to the construction of the building, the inside of which The Red Studio depicts. Altogether, this part of the exhibit was described as recounting the “biography” of the painting.
I did learn, though, that Sergei Shchukin, the Russian collector who’d commissioned The Red Studio, had rejected the finished painting. Having acquired a new house, the 18th-century Trubetskoy Palace in Moscow, Shchukin requested a series of works from Matisse to decorate it. He bought The Pink Studio, among many other Matisse canvases, including Dance II (1909-10) and Music (1910), but not the painting in question here.
In a letter responding to the artist who, having sent his patron the requested water-color copy of The Red Studio, described the new painting, Shchukin said he preferred Matisse’s paintings with people in them. This was almost certainly a flimsy excuse for not buying the commissioned work, since Shchukin had bought a number of Matisse paintings without figures, notably The Pink Studio.
Shchukin had a vast collection of modern art. Among the works in his palace home were 38 by Henri Matisse. (He fled Russia during the revolution in 1917 and his art collection was nationalized by the Bolshevik government. The art was split between the Hermitage in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum.)
The Red Studio remained unsold for the next 16 years. During that time, the painting was shown in several exhibits; it was met with bafflement or indifference. It was finally bought in 1927 by David Tennant, the founder of London’s exclusive Gargoyle Club, a members-only club that catered to artists, writers, celebrities, and aristocrats. The painting hung in the club’s ballroom until it was purchased in 1945 by Georges Keller, director of the Bignou Gallery in New York.
Once ensconced in New York, the painting received much better appreciation. American critics took to it avidly, and American artists absorbed its influence. In 1949, The Red Studio was acquired for MoMA’s collection.
I repeat what I said earlier about this part—half of the Matisse exhibit, or more if you count the individual items displayed: I found it too esoteric and too detailed to be relevant to my reason for coming to this show. It seemed like filler to me—what in the army we used to call “eye-wash,” stuff we added to a briefing to make it seem weightier than it really was and make it look flashier.
(By the way, I don’t contend that art conservation isn’t both important and interesting. I posted “Conserving Modern Art” on Rick On Theater on 11 December 2018 [with a passing mention of the subject in “Morris Louis,” 15 February 2010].)
We then crossed back over to the other gallery where The Red Studio was hanging with the six remaining paintings Matisse depicted in the work and the four additional pieces of his art that appear in the canvas.
Of interest here, were—aside from just seeing the artworks live that the artist had painted in his studio painting (that meta-art thing)—was the 1898 Corsica, The Old Mill, the oldest piece shown in The Red Studio. It’s a charming—New York Times art writer Roberta Smith called it “luscious”—little (153/16" × 18⅛") Impressionistic painting made in Ajaccio shortly after he and Amélie were married, with tiny brushstrokes that blend together like the dots in Pointillism.
Unlike his later Fauvist paintings, the colors, though not individually Naturalistic, combine to evoke a sense of reality, but taken from the perception of the artist at the moment of viewing, rather than an objective or empirical appraisal.
Other pieces I enjoyed were Le Luxe II, with nude female figures much like those in Dance I, which I already acknowledged I like, and the sculpture Decorative Figure, a somewhat muscular-looking nude woman half-perched on a square pedestal with her legs crossed.
Matisse apparently didn’t paint many male figures, but one of the paintings from The Red Studio is a teenage fisherman in Young Sailor II (1906), sitting in quarter profile in a peach-colored room, dressed in bright green pants and a blue pullover and cap. He has very strangely shaped eyes—almost Asian—with a green cast not to the iris, but the cornea. He also has a green line over his upper lip, like a peculiarly colored pencil mustache. I’d say Young Sailor was a clear example of the artist’s Fauvist period, right smack in the middle of which it falls.
The Red Studio itself, hanging in the very center of the main wall opposite the entrance, is pretty much as odd as the various descriptions and analyses I cited earlier suggest. First, the canvas is virtually all red except for the art within the painting and a few other objects. Not only the walls and the floor are red, but the several pieces of furniture are the same color as well. The artist was clearly spotlighting his work by obscuring everything else in monochrome red.
The curious technique Matisse used to draw those furniture pieces is striking if for no other reason than the painstaking care it must have taken to paint them. The artist didn’t paint the canvas red all over and then take some other color and sketch in the outlines of the chairs, tables, stools, chest of drawers, and grandfather clock (with no hands). No, he painted an undercoat, yellow in this case, and then painted the Venetian red ever so carefully so that he left the thinnest of lines of the yellow to create an outline, not thicker than a pencil line, of all those other objects, looking like red ghosts of furniture.
Only one piece of furniture in the room is more fully realized: a yellow rattan chaise. It’s on the right-hand side of the painting, directly across from the painting-in-painting rendering of Large Nude, hanging on the studio’s left wall. Marguerite, Matisse’s daughter and model, is reclining in that same chaise. For this and a couple of other reasons, the New York Times art reviewer Blake Gopnik thinks “Matisse meant his daughter’s naked image to be the true focus of “The Red Studio,” or at least its hidden theme.”
Then there’s the perspective. There isn’t any. Just left of center in the canvas is a corner, but the two walls and the floor together are as flat as a crêpe. It’s almost like a child’s drawing. (Okay, there’s a tiny indication of perspective—on the left-hand wall. It’s mostly provided by the frame of Large Nude whose right edge Matisse suggests is farther away than the left by making it shorter. But that’s pretty much all.)
As far as I’m concerned, its chief interest was in matching up the real paintings with the artist’s rendering of them in The Red Studio.
According to MoMA, Matisse rarely depicted himself in his art. I’ve seen reproductions of one or two self-portraits, so evidently, he did it occasionally. Instead of painting his own picture, as, say, Van Gogh did so often, Matisse turned to a common subject among artists: the studio painting.
In this exhibit alone, there’s evidence of a number of paintings either of his workplace (The Pink Studio; Studio Under the Eaves, 1903) or of sections of it (Still Life with Geraniums, 1910). He was inviting viewers into the place where he created. Curator Temkin asserts that, for Matisse, this glimpse at his work and his workspace is the same as a self-portrait.
On a table down front in the studio is a small box of blue pencils or crayons. Since the artist isn’t present in the atelier, he’s represented by the art on view—the results of his creativity—and the pencils—his means of creating. No other evidence of the work that happens in this space is visible: no easels, canvases in progress, brushes, paints, palettes. The art, it seems, happens by magic. Even time doesn’t pass here, since the clock has no hands.
The exhibit doesn’t specifically answer the question of why Matisse was so vilified in the Paris art world of the early 1900s. The issue of the disparagement and ignoring of The Red Studio is a little clearer, however.
First, the decision to paint it all over in red, nearly making it a monochromatic canvas, was radical for Matisse’s day. It eventually led to Mark Rothko (1903-70), who was directly influenced by The Red Studio when it was first shown at MoMA in 1949, and the Color Field painters such as Clifford Still (1904-80), Robert Motherwell (1915-91), and Barnett Newman (1905-70).
Matisse wasn’t an Abstract artist, like those other fellows, but he may well have opened the door to Abstract Expressionism, a style of art that developed in the immediate aftermath of World War II and continues to be a mainstay of American and European painting and sculpture.
Having started out as an Impressionist (Corsica, The Old Mill), the critical establishments as well as the public resisted when the artist turned to Fauvism—hence the “wild beast” epithet—and then moved on to absorb influences from Cubism (Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973, was a great friend—and rival—after Gertrude Stein introduced them at one of her salons) and Primitivism, ultimately developing the “Henri Matisse style.”
His influence on modern art wasn’t recognized or appreciated until later in his career, so in his early years, say until the ’30s, the critical and buying establishments rejected his work and even fellow artists, confused at what he was doing, didn’t embrace him. He was defying all the rules and changing everything, and I think they just resented that.
But, of course, the Impressionists had done the same thing some 40 years earlier, and then the Post-Impressionists followed. Matisse was just in the vanguard of the next wave,
Even Matisse himself wasn’t sure where he was headed. Of The Red Studio, the artist was reported to have said, “I like it, but I don’t quite understand it.”
Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, disclosed that Matisse’s “experiments on canvas broke so radically with norms, and triggered so much derision, that he was tormented by anxieties, undone by insomnia, near paralyzed by doubt.” (Among Smee’s books is Side by Side: Picasso v Matisse [Duffy and Snellgrove, 2002]. He was a finalist for another criticism Pulitzer in 2009.)
Overall, today’s art critics are far more positive about Henri Matisse and his work than their early-20th-century counterparts were. MoMA’s Matisse: The Red Studio garnered a lot of very positive attention in the press.
Lance Esplund called The Red Studio “monumental yet intimate—somewhere between picture and picture window” in the Wall Street Journal. He expanded:
Opaque yet airy, flat yet malleable, Matisse's saturated red plane . . . reads as floor, walls, objects and open space; as solid, fluid, atmosphere and void. The red expanse also, most perplexingly, feels alive, breathing. The painting strikes first not as a room filled with stuff but, like a cymbal crash, as a vibrating emotional chord, an overflow of feeling.
Of the MoMA show, Esplund characterized it as “equally enlightening and engaging,” but he went on about the painting: “Matisse’s red conundrum is among the most audacious and pivotal of early Modern pictures. In this exhibition . . . ‘The Red Studio’ feels no less radical today.”
Despite its overarching tension between taut flatness and deep space, “The Red Studio” stops short of pure abstraction. But even after more than a century of abstract painting, Matisse’s heaving, buckling, elastic red room inspires discord, awe. Matisse (1869-1954) is improvising here on the nature of representational painting space, in which we understand that a room has navigable height, width and depth. But it’s a gateway to modernist abstraction’s multidimensionality and pliable flat plane. As Matisse warps space, dissolves corners, collapses a table into the floor and challenges differentiations among objects, materials and locations, he challenges our notion of what a painting can be.
Commenting on the effect of the underpainting as it shows through the red over-coat, the Journalist asserted:
Throughout the canvas, ghostly outlines of underpainted ocher, blue, pink, orange, violet and green peek through the red plane. Bleeding forward, they read as veins of pure light or preliminary contour drawing. It’s as if the composition were in flux; as if Matisse—free-associating, ruminating, reconsidering—were still scratching the surface.
Esplund’s conclusion is his interpretation of the painting as a whole, an interesting exegesis:
In “The Red Studio”—more cauldron than interior—Matisse meditates on the nature of art and creation. Here, within the frontal red field, his reimagined and resurrected paintings and sculptures, interrelating, blossom and glow. The artworks provide the only real places of focus, rest, location. Matisse is inviting us backstage, into his most sacred space, immersing us in the depths of his own imagination and inspiration. He’s also holding our faces up to art’s furnace. By dissolving space, Matisse dissolves time (there is no doorway, no place to stand, no hands on the grandfather clock). There is only Matisse’s art—only the now. Through this radiant picture window, Matisse—and, by extension, MoMA—offers us a rare portal into the immediacy of the creative act.
In the Washington Post, Sebastian Smee labeled Matisse: The Red Studio “dream-inducing” while he characterized the painting as “overwhelming: It’s the optical-sensuous equivalent of a five-alarm fire.” The artist, he affirmed,
had come to understand what today (thanks largely to him) seems obvious: that color intensity is a function of size; that a square foot of red (to put it another way) is redder than a square inch of the same red. Compare this with the immediately preceding avant-garde movements, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, which broke color into smaller and smaller units, and you can grasp the profundity of Matisse’s revolution.
The WaPo reviewer affirmed: “‘The Red Studio’ stops short of abstraction. And just as its allover, uninflected red doesn’t entirely flatten out the space (perspective lines, painted in reserve, remain to suggest depth), the colored works arrayed around the studio break up the monochrome with exquisite harmonies.”
In conclusion, Smee quipped of the painting: “Just look at it. It may have achieved eminence, but it will never look old.”
The New York Times’ art critic Roberta Smith described Matisse: The Red Studio as “a small but spectacular exhibition that dissects one of the artist’s greatest early paintings.” Smith felt that the painting is
a statement of the artist’s values. The things that matter most to Matisse—from paintings and sculptures to an open box of blue pastels—are depicted here in their true colors. But most of the painting’s bulky items—two tables, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a grandfather clock whose face lacks hands, as if time stood still in the artist’s studio—appear almost as phantoms: They exist only as ocher outlines in the mass of red, brightened here and thereby little glimmers of pink and blue, felicitous leftovers from an earlier version of the painting.
Smith’s concluding assessment of MoMA’s Matisse show compared it to larger, more inclusive exhibits:
This season New York has had more than its share of large, exhausting exhibitions, among them MoMA’s Cézanne and Joseph Yoakum shows and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Surrealism survey. Seeing them was a challenge from which I emerged feeling drained, retaining a blurred experience and wondering “Who is this for?” Specialists who are at least 5-foot-10 and run marathons? In contrast, “Matisse: The Red Studio” gives you many fewer artworks but allows deeper concentration. You come away feeling restored, like you have been given a gift.
Blake Gopnik, also in the New York Times (which ran three rather large articles about this show, two of them reviews) dubbed Matisse: The Red Studio “a brilliantly focused exhibition.” He advised, “Art lovers will want to catch the exhibition, or catch it again and again, before it closes” (which it will just today).
In his opening to the review, Gopnik presented elements of The Red Studio’s backstory as if it were “promotional copy for a true-crime drama.” Then he explained that he’d come to MoMA three times to see this small show to suss out “a story that, for something like 100 years now, has lain camouflaged beneath the painting’s red surface.”
Gopnik spends the rest of his review raising questions that come to his mind while viewing (and re-viewing) The Red Studio and then speculating on the answers, sometimes with and sometimes without evidence.
The Financial Times’ Ariella Budick insisted that The Red Studio “hasn’t relinquished the ability to rattle and exhilarate. Its radicalism endures.” “MoMA has built an enchanting little show around that single masterpiece,” Budick added.
“The resulting mini-retrospective-within-a-show,” felt the FT reviewer, “traces Matisse’s growth and desires as they manifested in 1911.”
Karen Wilkin of The New Criterion labeled the MoMA Matisse exhibit “something wonderful” and “dazzling.” The painting itself, she said, is “familiar and yet endlessly fresh.” As viewers, Wilkin affirmed,
We savor the expanse of resonant, not quite Venetian red, check off the representations of works we know well, and puzzle over less familiar ones. We note the complex interplay of drawing and planes of color, as well as the even more complex (and tedious to describe) relationship of like and unlike elements, and much else. It’s always exciting to spend time with The Red Studio, but now the elegant, ample moma installation surrounds us with the actual paintings, sculptures, and the ceramic plate we know so well from their “portraits” in the picture, each presented individually but in close enough proximity that we can compare the real thing with its representation as we contemplate it for its individual merits.
“It’s an art historian’s dream come true,” she added. The New Criterion writer thought that “the presence of the actual works catalogued in The Red Studio allows us to track Matisse’s path from 1898 to 1911, while the proximity of the real thing to the fictive image sharpens our perception of both.” Wilkin felt that “seeing The Red Studio brought to life” was a “heady pleasure.”
In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl labeled Matisse: The Red Studio “a jewel box of a show” and asserted that the “eloquently mounted” show, “immerses a viewer in the marvels of an artistic revolution that resonates to this day.”
“Gorgeous?” asks Schjeldahl about the painting. “Oh, yeah,” he answers himself. “Aesthetic bliss saturates—radically, to a degree still apt to startle when you pause to reflect on it—the means, ends, and very soul of a style that was so far ahead of its time that its full influence took decades to kick in.”
The New Yorker reviewer described his experience viewing The Red Studio:
Contours tend to be summarily indicated by thin yellow lines. Part of a pale-blue window obtrudes. But nothing disrupts the composition’s essential harmony, the details striking the eye all at once, with a concerted bang.
On Vulture, the website that posts articles from New York magazine, Jerry Saltz wrote that “The Red Studio is among the most gorgeous lodestars in all of modernism.” The exhibit, he declared, is “a ravishingly compact show.” Then Saltz added, “You look around at this art-historical reunion and a long-gone world becomes young again. It goes off inside you like a depth charge.”
“‘Matisse: The Red Studio’ does a lot in a little space,” reported the New York review-writer, “and reminds us that blockbusters can come in small packages.” He continued:
In this concise show, we can ponder things longer, linger, make connections, see how one work might grow out of another without feeling overwhelmed, swamped by numbers, and exhausted at the end. . . . We see how, in an incredibly condensed period of time, an artist can traverse universes and touch down in places unexpected. We witness an artist not only inventing and reinventing himself but reinventing art history as he does so. In these little spaces, you can almost hear these mighty engines roar.
Saltz declared the painting “an origami of sundering simplicity, setting new geometric ordinances that insist the highly abstract world inside his painting is a real world, imagined or not.” The studio is, therefore, “both illusionistic and tangible, rational and insane, almost like a cave painting.”
The painting is “striking” and the exhibit is “enticing,” wrote Melissa Rodman on The Arts Fuse. “Making the viewer draw visual connections among Matisse’s pieces is at the core of [Matisse:]The Red Studio,” added Rodman.
“With light-handed, unobtrusive curatorial touches, the
first room encourages the viewer to wander around the works of art, seemingly
plucked from Matisse’s canvas and dropped into the present,” the Arts Fuse
reviewer asserted. “Together these works
gain a certain depth, vivified because of their proximity to the titular
painting. Likewise, the painting comes
alive in the presence of the standalone pieces it depicts.”
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