Matisse gets his place in the timeline of painting because of his use of color. He did things with color no-one had before, and influenced many artists who followed. Matisse's Red Studio is important for its use of color and its flattened perspective, his altering of reality and our perception of space.
He painted it in 1911, after his exposure to traditional Islamic art during a visit to Spain, which influenced his use of pattern, decoration, and depiction of space. Red Studio gets grouped together with three other paintings Matisse did that year -- The Painter's Family, The Pink Studio, and Interior with Aubergines – as standing "at a crossroads 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"1.
The elements Matisse included "sink their individual identities into what became a prolonged meditation on art and life, space, time, perception and the nature of reality itself."2 Or put far more simplistically, he painted a personal reality, the world as he perceived and experienced it, in a way that made sense to him.
If you look at his earlier paintings, such as Harmony in Red, painted in 1908, you'll see Matisse was working towards the style in Red Studio, it didn't pop up from nowhere.
I like The Red Studio partly because of the intense, glowing red; partly for the cheek of reducing objects to mere outlines; partly because he’s included other artwork of his in it as well as his easel and a box of pencils. It's as if I'm walking through the studio door, as if he’s behind me and about to say something about what he’s working on. But it wasn't love at first sight; it's grown on me.
REFERENCES:
1&2. Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, p81
