There are certain pictures that take two or three decades to really 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 really became, “I’m going to paint my world. That’s where I can say everything.”
In 1906, this Moscow textile magnate, Sergei Shchukin, who was a big fan of modern art,
met Matisse and became an absolutely essential part of Matisse’s career. At the very end of 1910,
Shchukin asked Matisse to paint a trio of paintings on any subject Matisse wanted.
The first thing he makes is The Pink Studio, which is 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.
The Red Studio actually 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.
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.
So at the beginning of 1912, Matisse sends Shchukin a very quick watercolor sketch of it
and a quite 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 having this picture turned down by his trustee patron.
But what he said to a journalist who came to see him in the studio is that
“I don’t understand this picture. I don’t understand exactly why I did what I did.”
In the summer of 1912, Roger Fry, who is a very distinguished art historian, critic, curator,
and painter himself, writes to Matisse and says, “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 sends this painting to London, where it will have its premiere in October.
Back then, there was an establishment of artists, and of audience, who still expected color to be
the color that they looked at when they looked at something in the world. And artists, like Matisse,
were saying, “It’s not the job of the artist to tell you what the world looks like.
It's the job of the artist to create something out of his or her imagination that’s brand new.”
A hundred years ago, generally, modern art, it was mocked.
There was a lot of concern that these ideals of classical beauty were being
ignored and being erased.
That’s what happened with much of the public for the Grafton Gallery’s show.
In fact, the New York Times review of the show called Matisse’s sculptures “hideous.”
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 it was in.
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 comes back to Matisse’s studio.
By the time that The Red Studio makes its debut in Paris, in 1926, circumstances for Matisse and
for the culture are completely changed. All of a sudden, he wasn’t really ahead of his
time anymore. He was very much in sync with the flavor of the culture at that moment.
So finally, The Red Studio finds a buyer.
In the autumn of 1927, a British man named David Tennant
is interested in a Matisse painting for a nightclub that he opened in 1925,
called the Gargoyle Club. And [Matthew Stewart] Prichard designed the ballroom
to be an entirely mirrored space. It was a fantasy. And The Red Studio is on that wall
in a nice, kind of plain frame. People would be drinking and
dancing and dining with The Red Studio as the only work of art in that whole big ballroom.
At the beginning of World War II, David Tennant decides he wants to sell The Red Studio.
He sells it to a man called George Keller, who was a head of a gallery called the Bignou Gallery in New York City.
He had bought it for himself personally, 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.”
Finally, that painting’s time had come.
And with the passage of time, it became a work that had an enormous amount of influence
on the artists who were working in New York City in the late 1940s, 1950s.
Here are these artists, like Mark Rothko,
or Barnett Newman, or, a little younger,
Ellsworth Kelly, thinking about making paintings in which a big expanse
of color that doesn’t describe anything, that just is there for its own expressive purposes.
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’s a picture of his studio.
And from that point, he goes on to just making paper cutouts, which are painted paper that he
pins all over the walls of his studio in his home. And it’s almost like his whole studio,
his whole apartment, became a work of art. And for me, that’s almost like the fulfillment
of this little seed that had been planted with The Red Studio, that color becomes your environment.