This painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. It shows the interior of Matisse's painting studio, with flattened perspective or a single picture plane. The walls of his studio weren't actually red, they were white; he used red in his painting for effect.
On display in his studio are various of his artworks and bits of studio furniture. The outlines of the furniture in his studio are lines in the paint revealing color from a lower, yellow and blue layer, not painted on top of the red.
On display in his studio are various of his artworks and bits of studio furniture. The outlines of the furniture in his studio are lines in the paint revealing color from a lower, yellow and blue layer, not painted on top of the red.
"Angled lines suggest depth, and the blue-green light of the window intensifies the sense of interior space, but the expanse of red flattens the image. Matisse heightens this effect by, for example, omitting the vertical line of the corner of the room."
-- MoMA Highlights, published by Moma, 2004, page 77.
"All the elements... sink their individual identities in what became a prolonged meditation on art and life, space, time, perception and the nature of reality itself... a crossroad for Western painting, where the classic outward-looking, predominantly representational art of the past met the provisional, internalised and self-referential ethos of the future..."
- Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, page 81.