Henri Matisse's The Red Studio: The Journey of a Painting

その作品を見るまでに20年以上かかる作品があるなんて！それはどのくらい最先端な作品だったのでしょう。次の世代の雰囲気を一人の人間の直感の中に見ることができることは奇跡です。あなたは次の世代を感じることはできますか？あなたも無意識の中に次世代を感じることができるかも。I can't believe it took over two or three decades to see that piece! How cutting edge was that work? It is a miracle that we can see the atmosphere of the next generation in one person's intuition. Can you sense the next generation? You may feel the next generation in your unconscious, too.

Henri Matisse's The Red Studio: The Journey of a Painting

"I don't know why I precisely painted it this way," Henri Matisse once said of "The Red Studio." Now seen as a groundbreaking work that introduced monochrome to the vocabulary of modern art, this 1911 painting initially baffled even the artist himself.

In this article, "The Red Studio's" history-from, from its rejection by Matisse's patron and the public to its time in a London nightclub to its eventual acquisition by MoMA-and considers the painting's influence on subsequent generations of artists.

1)

There are specific pictures that take two or three decades to see the work.

And that's what exactly happened with The Red Studio.

In a way, Matisse's studio was his world.

And for so many artists, their studio is their world.

So, when his idea was, "How do I paint the world?"

it became, "I'm going to paint my world.

That's where I can say everything."

2)

In 1906, this Moscow textile magnate,

Sergei Shchukin, a big fan of modern art,

met Matisse and became an essential part of Matisse's career.

At the very end of 1910,

Shchunkin asked Matisse to paint a trio of paintings on any subject Matisse wanted.

3)

The first thing he made is The Pink Studio,

which was a pretty naturalistic portrayal of his studio in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux.

So even though colors are very unrealistic,

you can see the wood paneling on the wall;

you can see a window with a view outside of it;

and what's left and what's right, and so forth.

4)

The Red Studio began as a studio picture that was closer in its palette to The Pink Studio.

After living with that a little bit,

Matisse made the very bold decision that he was going to take one color,

Venetian red, and coat the whole surface of the painting with it.

5)

And so, what he ended up with was a painting that was more than two thirds red at a point

when the monochrome had not yet really entered the vocabulary of modern art.

6)

So at the beginning of 1912,

Matisse sent Shchukin a rapid watercolor sketch of it

and a pretty beautiful letter describing what he was trying to do with it.

Shchukin says,

"No, thank you." And what he did to be polite was say,

"I now prefer your paintings with figures."

None of us can know exactly how he felt about having this picture turned down by his trustee patron.

But what he said to a journalist who came to see him in the studio in that

"I don't understand this picture. I don't understand exactly why I did what I did."

7)

In the summer of 1912,

Roger Fry is a very distinguished art historian, critic, curator,

and painter himself wrote to Matisse and said,

"I'm organizing a group show of contemporary art

at a place called the Grafton Galleries in London.

And I would love you to send us some great works."

Matisse sent this painting to London,

where it had its premiere in October.

8)

There was an establishment of artists

and audiences who still expected the color to be

the color they looked at when they looked at something in the world.

And artists like Matisse

were saying, "It's not the artist's job to tell you what the world looks like.

It's the artist's job to create something out of their imagination that's brand new."

A hundred years ago, generally, modern art was mocked.

There was a lot of concern that these ideals of classical beauty were being ignored and erased.

That's what happened with much of the public for the Grafton Gallery's show.

The New York Times review of the show called Matisse's sculptures "hideous."

9)

After the London show, The Red Studio crossed the Atlantic to be in the Armory Show

in New York City and then Chicago, and then in Boston.

It was the first big extravaganza of modern art in the States.

And nobody bought a single painting by Matisse in any of the three cities.

10)

Instead, there was a lot of ridicule, again,

a lot of anger and hostility, to the degree that,

at the Chicago venue of the exhibition,

art students burned three reproductions of paintings by Matisse in effigy.

So the painting came back to Matisse's studio.

By the time The Red Studio made its debut in Paris in 1926,

the circumstances for Matisse and the culture were changed entirely.

Suddenly, he wasn't ahead of his time anymore.

He was very much in sync with the flavor of the culture at that moment.

11)

So finally, The Red Studio found a buyer.

In the autumn of 1927, a British man named David Tennant

was interested in a Matisse painting for a nightclub that he opened in 1925,

called the Gargoyle Club.

And [Mattew Stewart] Prichard designed the ballroom

to be an entirely mirrored scape.

It was a fantasy.

And The Red Studio was on that wall in a friendly, plain frame.

So people would be drinking, dancing, and dining with The Red Studio

as the only work of art in that big ballroom.

12)

At the beginning of World War II, David Tennant decided he wanted to sell The Red Studio.

So he sold it to George Keller,

who was ahead of a gallery called the Bignow Gallery in New York City.

He had bought it for himself,

but he had it on view from time to time.

And that's where quite a few MoMA curators and trustees would see it.

And then, at the end of 1948, he let them know,

"Yes, I would sell this."

13)

Finally, that painting's time had come.

And with time, it became a work that had an enormous amount of influence

on the artists working in New York City in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Here were these artists, like Mark Rothko,

or Barnett Newman, or, a little younger,

Ellsworth Kelly, thinking about making paintings in which an enormous expanse

of color that doesn't describe anything, that is there for its expressive purposes.

14)

At the end of his life, Matisse also came around to The Red Studio.

The last finished oil painting that he made was called Large Red Interior.

And it was a picture of his studio.

And from that point, he went on to just make paper cutouts,

which were painted paper that he pinned all over the walls of his studio in his home.

And it was almost like his whole studio,

his whole apartment, became a work of art.

And for me, that's almost like the fulfillment

of this tiny seed planted with The Red Studio; that color becomes your environment.

Henri Matisse's The Red Studio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDYlSLWAjQs

L'Atelier Rouge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Atelier_Rouge