Seeing Red: Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly at the FLV

“Why not grow something useful, like potatoes,” Émile-Hippolyte Henri Matisse, a successful grain merchant, advised his artist son Henri, who had been touring him through a magnificent flower garden on the family’s rented property in Issy-Les Moulineaux. The younger Matisse’s family had moved to a house just outside Paris proper in the fall of 1909. Émile-Hippolyte Matisse was a pragmatist. His oldest son was a dreamer, a visionary destined to become one of the greatest modern artists in history. The difference in their sensibilities remained a stumbling block in their awkward relationship. Unfortunately, Émile-Hippolyte did not live to see his son’s greatest success. He died of a sudden heart attack one year later, on October 15, 1910. The loss of his father’s recognition added to the pain of Henri’s life in 1911, the year he completed his enigmatic The Red Studio.

Today, The Red Studio holds pride of place in an exhibition dedicated to its imagery, its history, and its iconography. On view in the Fondation Louis Vuitton through September 9th,  Matisse: L’Atelier Rouge (Matisse: The Red Studio) brings together for the first time in Paris several works of art that populated Henri Matisse’s Issy studio more than 113 years ago. In these galleries, a semi-circular installation enshrines the roughly 6 x 7-foot canvas. On our left side facing The Red Studio, we see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Young Sailor II (1906), the SMK-National Gallery of Denmark’s Nude with White Scarf (1909), and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud’s Corsica, the Old Mill (1898).  On our right side, we see a private collection’s Cyclamen (1911), the SMK-National Gallery of Denmark’s Le Luxe II (1907-8) and its Bathers (1907). 

Arranged in an inner semi-circle, we see the three sculptures: a private collection’s Upright Nude with Arched Back (1906-7), the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Decorative Figure (1906), and the Fondation Bayeler’s bronze caste of Jeannet IV (1911), as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s Female Nude drawn with blue lines on a white ceramic plate (1907).  The Large Nude (1911) we see in The Red Studio was destroyed by Matisse’s daughter Marguerite in compliance with her father’s posthumous instructions.  

In adjacent galleries, we see other works that contextualize The Red Studio, such as the Musée d’Orsay’s A Room in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912) by Roger Fry, and the Museum of Modern Art’s The Blue Window (1913) and Goldfish and Sculpture (1912), as well as the Centre Pompidou’s Large Red Interior (1942), the latter three by Matisse.  The whole curatorial enterprise with its accompanying archival documents, photographs, and lavish catalogue deserves tremendous praise. It is an historic achievement, meticulously organized and researched by Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, and Dorthe Aagesen, Chief Curator and Senior Researcher at the SMK/National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, in collaboration with the Henri Matisse Archives.

The Red Studio features 11 artworks, and several paintings stacked up against an imaginary red wall. We also see the outlines of a grandfather clock without hands to tell us the time, two chairs (a red one outlined in yellow and one pale yellow lounge surrounded by red), a red chest of drawers decorated with objects set against a Persian pattern above the top, and a curvaceous clay vase standing on the imaginary red floor. On the left a red table displays a small, black, long-necked, bulb shaped vase sprouting an arabesque tangle of nasturtium vines that encircle Matisse’s Upright Nude. On the same table we see the light green-blue outlines of a glass goblet, the white interior of a navy-blue box of light blue crayons plus two other blue crayons set out for use, and the oval white ceramic dish with Female Nude outlined in blue. This ceramic plate seems to rest on a navy-blue cloth, similar in its color to the box of crayons, the Young Sailor’s jacket, the sky in Le Luxe II, and other touches of blue throughout the painting, creating a circular connection within the composition. On two red pedestals, we see the Decorative Figure and Jeannette IV in plaster. 

In the original version, begun in 1910, the studio artworks and furniture appeared within a detailed interior, similar to The Pink Studio. The wood panels were blue separated by thin, green lines. Perhaps, Still Life with Geraniums (1910) offers a hint of the original colors. Then, in December 1911, Matisse spontaneously covered most of the surface in Venetian red, minimizing the illusionistic references to depth and introducing an almost abstract sense of space, insisting, in a radical way, that the painting is as an entity unto itself, a studio within his studio, a space of his own invention.

This wasn’t the first time Matisse hastily changed a cool unifying blue background into a more aggressive red. Le Dessert: Harmony in Red (1909) started out as Harmony in Blue. However, Le Dessert enlisted cadmium red as the painting’s unifier within a decorative tour-de-force, connecting the wallpaper to the resplendent tablecloth. It’s a brash red in comparison to Venetian red’s somber hue.  Almost 40 years later, Matisse chose cadmium red again to pull together Large Red Interior (1948). For a closer look at the various layers and colors Matisse chose for The Red Studio, please watch the MoMA conservators’ excellent video which elaborates on the artistic decisions leading up to The Red Studio we know today.

“Where did I take this red from?” Matisse responded to the Danish painter and art historian Ernst Goldschmidt for his article in Politiken (December 24, 1911). Evidently, they were discussing The Red Studio, called Le Panneau Rouge (The Red Panel) way back then. “I couldn’t say. But in a little while we’ll take a walk in the garden, and maybe then things will seem clearer to you.” Venetian red (a.k.a brick red) is earthy.  It comes from iron oxide found in hematite rocks. Bold but not bright, like scarlet or poppy, Venetian red dates back to prehistoric times, specifically the Paleolithic caves in Altamira, Spain, c. 35,000-11,000 BC. 

This particular choice of red infuses The Red Studio with a soberness that contradicts our usual associations with red: joy or good luck. One wonders if this hue matches the artist’s mood at the time, still mourning the loss of his father, Matisse expert Jack Flam tells us in his biography of the artist. His father had hoped Henri would join his business or become a lawyer, which he was training for when an attack of appendicitis opened the door to a completely different direction. As he convalesced at home, his mother Anna Héloise Gerard, an amateur artist, gave him a paint set. “Once bitten by the demon of painting, I never wanted to give up. I begged my parents for, and finally, got permission to go to Paris to study painting seriously.” (“Matisse Speaks, Art News, November 1951). 

The potato conversation with his father appears in Jack Flam’s and Hilary Spurling’s biography of this great modern master (which I quote) to demonstrate a significant moment in Henri Matisse’s Issy period. Whatever prompted Matisse to cover his entire depiction of his present studio in Venetian red required a bit of defiance against the paternalistic art authorities that held sway in 1911. Here was the rage and the courage to take control of his destiny. Like his cherished flowers, which provided the vibrant colors that inspired his palette, The Red Studio became another kind of garden. Reminiscent of freshly tilled soil, this extraordinarily innovative painting may be considered a metaphor: the studio as a garden, a place where the artist’s ideas take root, germinate, and burst forth in full bloom. The studio as a garden also requires cultivation and pruning. 

However, within this metaphorical garden, we perceive an unsettling contrast of busyness and restraint. The whole scene feels carefully staged, as if the studio were tidied up for a critic’s visit. The controlling power of the Venetian red corresponds to Matisse’s public persona as a well-brought-up bourgeois fellow, rather than an iconoclastic, arty bohemian. He became the accessible “comfy chair” Matisse based on his famous “Notes from a Painter” publish in La Grande Revue in 1908. 

The move to Issy-Les-Moulineaux enhanced this embourgeoisement as well as his self-imposed isolation. Living geographically and socially distant from the center of Paris — its cafés, galleries, and rollicking balls — Matisse exiled himself from the fast and furious networking which drove his friends, and rivals, during the early 20th century’s avant-garde.   

The “King of the Fauves” moved his family to a modest rented house in a still sparsely populated village, about five kilometers from the Eiffel Tower. There, Matisse purchased a prefabricated shed-like structure from the Companie des Constructions Démontables et Hygiégeniques and had this new studio constructed within walking distance from his home on the Route de Clamart (now Avenue du Général de Gaulle) and Rue Baudin. The total cost was 11,000 francs, paid out through April 1910. This sum increased their annual expense of 3,000 francs for the rental of their home.  

His previous studio in the Convent des Sacré Coeur (which became the Musée Rodin, Hôtel Biron, since 1916), 33 Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, had been a communal artists’ space he shared with his family, artist friends, and school since 1907. At the beginning of 1909 the residents received notice from the government that the property would be sold. They had to pack up and move elsewhere. (You may recall that Jacqueline Marval moved into Matisse’s studio at 19 boulevard St. Michel in 1917, almost a decade after Henri moved into his next studio in the Convent des Oiseaux, 86 rue de Sèvres, in 1908.)  

Henri Matisse turned 40 years old on December 31, 1909.  The decision to leave central Paris and move to Issy signaled a withdrawal from an artworld poised to embrace or reject the latest challenge to its traditions, Cubism! Matisse and his cronies already shook the art establishment’s foundations with their Fauve revolution in 1905. Now, the great upstarts were Picasso, Braque. Metzinger and Gleizes. Issy offered a retreat from all that. It was a haven for tending his flower garden and recalibrating his artistic direction, while staying true to his fundamental ideals. He loved the pure color of flowers, which grew in abundance around his home. Color was Matisse’s vehicle for light in art. Venetian red in The Red Studio references a warm, interior light, the kind of red we see when we shut our eyes in a fully lit room.

The Red Studio was commissioned by Matisse’s most loyal collector at the time, the Russian industrialist Sergei Shchukin (1854-1939). It was meant to hang in Shchukin’s home in Moscow along with other Matisse paintings his patron purchased recently: The Pink Studio (1911), The Painter’s Family (1911), The Dance II (1910) and Music (1910). These four painting reflected the French artist’s conflicting plans for an empty canvas. On the one hand, the detailed, biographical vignettes in The Pink Studio (1911) and The Painter’s Family (1911) record moments in the privacy of his workspace and his home. On the other hand, the simple contours of the human bodies enveloped by two flat colors, green and blue, earth and sky, in Dance II and Music, flirted with abstraction. This dialogue between figure and ground led to pure, non-objective among the Orphists’ who were the first to introduce abstract art to Paris in the 1912 Salon d’Automne. 

Unexpectedly, Shchukin rejected The Red Studio, even though The Pink Studio and The Red Studio seemed to be a pendant pair. We can see, for example, Le Luxe II (1907-1908), Nude with White Scarf (1909), the sculpture Decorative Figure (1908), and Cyclamen (1911) in both the “red” and “pink” paintings. Disappointed at this turn of events, Matisse placed The Red Studio in two groundbreaking exhibitions: the legendary Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London, October 5 to December 31, 1912, and the International Exhibition of Modern Art (aka “Armory Show”) in New York, Chicago, and Boston for most of 1913. 

In 1927, The Red Studio finally found an owner, David Pax Tennant (1902-1968), who was only 25 years old at the time. He had been a mere toddler when Matisse took Paris by storm as a “wild beast,” a Fauve. Tennant hung the painting on a mirrored wall in his trendy night spot, the Gargoyle Club in London. In 1938, Tennant decided to sell the painting and offer it first to Matisse, who refused to buy it. In 1942, the painting ended up in the hands of a Swiss art dealer, Georges Frédéric Keller, the director of the French owned Bignou Gallery in New York, located in the Rolls-Royce Building at 32 East 57th Street, not far from the Museum of Modern Art’s new building on East 53rd Street. In January 1948, the Bignou Gallery opened Matisse: Three Decades, 1900-1930, an exhibition of 17 works, including The Red Studio. Later that year, the painting traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (not far from the prodigious collector Albert Barnes’ home) for its first comprehensive Matisse exhibition that opened in April 3rd and closed on May 9th. 

In December 1948, Keller told the art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. that “the studio” painting was for sale. The price tag was $35,000. Barr had been the director of the Museum of Modern Art from August 1929 through 1943. In 1948, he was the director of research for the Department of Painting and Sculpture and a member of the Committee on the Museum of Collections. Having seen The Red Studio in the Bignou Gallery, Barr was keen to add it to the Museum of Modern’s permanent collection.  He called an “emergency meeting” on December 14th, desperate to stake a claim before Albert Barnes’ visit to New York City at the end of the month. Trustee Olga Guggenheim saved the day through her Simon Guggenheim Fund. In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art proudly displayed The Red Studio in its exhibition Recent Acquisitions from May 3rd through July 17th. At that point, Matisse’s painting received its present name The Red Studio and its status as a major influence on contemporary artists and the history of modern art.

“Now over 110 years old,” Ann Temkin observes, “The Red Studio is both a landmark within the centuries-long tradition of studio paintings and a foundational work of modern art. The picture remains a touchstone for any artist taking on the task of portraying their studio. Matisse’s radical decision to saturate the work’s surface with a layer of red has fascinated generations of scholars and artists, including Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly.”  

This “foundational” role gave rise to the New York School’s Color Field and Hard-Edge movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton we see proof of this phenomenon in the stunning retrospective Ellsworth Kelly: Shapes and Colors, 1949-2015. The Red Studio instigated the tension between figure and ground, depicted and literal space, within a work of art. Ellsworth Kelly’s took the baton from Matisse, creating simply geometric shapes that eschew anecdote completely in order to foreground the tension between depicted and literal space or the literal flat space of the canvas floating against a white wall (figure and ground).  The pairing of these formidable artists illustrates the continuum between early modernist figurative artists and their progeny, the Post-WWII abstractionists. It also vindicates Émile-Hippolyte Matisse’s son Henri, whose bold Venetian red “garden” became more useful than a plot of pommes de terre. 

DETAILS

In addition to Matisse: L’Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio) and Ellsworth Kelly: Forms et Couleurs, 1949-2015, the Fondation Louis Vuitton offers LuYang’s film Doku the Flow through September 9th, and the pleasure of viewing the inside and outside of its exciting Frank Gehry building, all for the price of one ticket (16 euros for adults and less for students, artists, and so forth).   

Sources:  

Ann Temkin and Dorthe Aagesen, Matisse: The Red Studio, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022. (Venetian red, history of the painting, Matisse’s studio, provenance) 

Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1986. The potato story was told to Flam by the artist’s son, New York art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) during an in-person interview on March 30, 1983.   

Jack Flam, editor, Matisse: A Retrospective, Park Lane, New York, 1988. (quotes in English from “Matisse Speaks” and Ernst Goldschmidt interview). 

Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005. (conversation with his father) 

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Press Release.

Videos about The Red Studio (excellent opportunities to see the painting up close): 

Museum of Modern Art 

Smarthistory.org 

Expertisez in French with English subtitles 

Tour and Interview with Ann Temkin