Anny Aviram: It’s always been sort of a very mysterious painting.
He leaves clues, but at the same time he confuses you.
Abed Haddad: We’ve had the painting in the lab for about, almost two years now, right?
Michael Duffy: Yeah. Anny: Exactly.
Abed: And we look at it every day and every day we always say we find something new.
Caroline Hoover: It’s so true
Abed: Our goals were very simple, I would say, in the beginning.
But then I think, as we kept looking more and more into it, you know, it’s more than
meets the eye.
Michael: It didn’t just start off as a red painting, or it wasn’t initially conceived
as a red painting…
Caroline: You start thinking about what’s underneath the red.
Michael: In the background, if you look closely, you can see little glimpses of blue peeking
through.
Abed: The floor has glimpses of pink.
There are glimpses of ochre.
Caroline: He leaves those colors at the edges of the furniture.
Abed: And we see little clues like that throughout the painting.
Michael: When we unframed the painting, we saw very clearly on the edges there were these
colors present.
That was one of our first discoveries that really intrigued us.
Anny: That’s amazing!
You can see it all the way up here.
Caroline: It covers the whole…
Anny: …where it stops, it covers the whole back.
Abed: It confirmed that this blue that we see on the edge extends possibly throughout
the entirety of the wall.
The pink extends throughout the entirety of the foreground, and the furniture itself was
painted with an ochre yellow.
Anny: And then you see drips, drips of pink, drips of blue.
And I said, “Oh, so this is the same blue that I’m seeing in this little area.”
Michael: We decided to take a microscopic sample of paint from the edge.
And we mounted them to be able to look at them under the microscope and see the stratigraphy.
Anny: With those cross sections we also understood clearly how the layers were very defined.
We knew then that the red was applied when those bottom layers were dry.
Abed: We acquired a new instrument called an XRF scanner.
What that does is, it’s able to map elements across a surface.
We didn’t really expect there to be any super-new findings, but in scanning the wall,
we found vertical lines that go all the way down from the top to the floor.
And those were in chromium, which indicates that they were probably done in viridian green.
I was kind of, like, shrieking, basically.
I was like, “Oh my god, can you believe what we’re seeing?”
And you can see actually those green lines around the edges of some of the works.
So, for example, with the Young Sailor, there is a smidgen of green on the top of the painting
and then on the bottom of the painting in a vertical alignment.
It was completely astounding.
For one, it mimics the paneling that’s in the studio, but also it makes The Red Studio
much more like The Pink Studio in spirit, right?
Caroline: Mm-hmm, which is kind of an accurate representation.
So the intermediate stage before the red came on, we think, was a blue wall with green lines
for the paneling and then green molding along the bottom, the pink floor, and then the furniture
was all ochre.
Anny: Then he kept it and was thinking about it and didn’t touch it for like, we estimate,
a month, if not more.
And then he went for the red in almost one shot.
I think it’s very courageous.
Caroline: And then you can look at the UV photo, and you see the brush strokes.
And so that’s another clue.
Anny: Right.
The brush strokes are very fast, very quick.
Abed: There are these, like, hairs that are stuck in the paint, because he was so vigorously
applying it that it would just get pulled off of the brush and he didn’t go back and
take them off.
Anny: It just gave you a sense of how resolved he was.
Michael: Yeah, and even after using the Venetian red to cover the foreground and the wall,
he then continued on and used the red to paint over the figures in the painting, in the upper
right and also in the frame of the Large Nude on the left.
Caroline: I mean, think about all those details he painted out and got rid of, and it no longer
really looks like the studio and it becomes this abstract work because of the red.
Abed: It kind of imparts…a bit of serenity looking at it.
It doesn’t feel so loud.
It doesn’t feel so brash.
Michael: This radical shift in tonality and color and this choice of red is so bold.
There is no going back.
Abed: He saw this as a completed, finished work.
Michael: He writes his name in very thin ochre paint.
Abed: And especially on the top of an area that was originally ochre.
Michael: Yes, yes.
Abed: It’s kind of a little trick.
Michael: Yeah.
Caroline: Another clue.
All: Another clue, yeah.
Michael: Thinking of Matisse present in this painting and how he transformed it, with all
our imaging techniques, we were able to really describe that in a way that made his studio
practice come to life.
Anny: Right, and you enter the most private place in an artist’s life, his studio.
Abed: Thinking of a hundred years later, there was gonna be four people digging deep into it.
Anny: I would love if people could come to the gallery, see this painting, and share
everything that we have seen and discovered, let the public discover it.