The Painting Nobody Wanted: How Matisse’s The Red Studio Went from a London Nightclub to a Masterpiece of Modern Art

A jour­nal­ist paid Hen­ri Matisse a vis­it not long after he’d paint­ed The Red Stu­dio in 1911. “I like it, but I don’t com­plete­ly under­stand it,” the artist is quot­ed as admit­ting of that lat­est work. “I like it, but I don’t know why I pre­cise­ly paint­ed it this way.” The paint­ing was a ren­di­tion of the very same Issy-les-Moulin­eaux stu­dio in which they were talk­ing, though you would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly rec­og­nize it at first glance. Deep red cov­ered two-thirds of its sur­face, an unortho­dox choice that prob­a­bly con­tributed to its rejec­tion by Matis­se’s loy­al patron Sergei Shchukin, who’d com­mis­sioned Dance and Music. This depar­ture from strict rep­re­sen­ta­tion fared no bet­ter when it was shown in Lon­don, and there­after at the ground­break­ing 1913 “Armory Show” in the Unit­ed States.

By 1926, when The Red Stu­dio final­ly made its Paris debut, pub­lic sen­si­bil­i­ties had begun to catch up with Matis­se’s instincts. The fol­low­ing year, it found a buy­er in the own­er of Lon­don’s Gar­goyle Club, a favorite haunt of the Bright Young Things, where the paint­ing would hang for more than a decade.

Even­tu­al­ly it end­ed up at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, whose video at the top of the post tells the sto­ry of the paint­ing’s jour­ney from endur­ing absolute rejec­tion to exert­ing great influ­ence on post­war New York artists like Mark Rothko, Bar­nett New­man, and Ellsworth Kel­ly. All of those younger painters were explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what MoMA cura­tor Ann Temkin calls “a big expanse of col­or that does­n’t describe any­thing, that just is there for its own expres­sive pur­pos­es.”

Gal­lerist-YouTu­ber James Payne explores the paint­ing’s evo­lu­tion in greater detail  in his new Great Art Explained video above. But this image, which “seemed to break almost every estab­lished rule of West­ern paint­ing,” did­n’t come out of nowhere. Around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments were chang­ing human­i­ty’s under­stand­ing of real­i­ty, while Paris was becom­ing espe­cial­ly fer­tile ground for new ideas about art, per­cep­tion, and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Inspired by a vari­ety of oth­er Euro­pean artists and, increas­ing­ly, for­eign cul­tures as well, Matisse had already made his mark as one of the so-called Fau­vists, a group of painters who ont épaté la bour­geoisie with their bold, delib­er­ate­ly non-real­is­tic use of col­or. Fol­low­ing his instincts from there, Matisse cre­at­ed this scene awash in red and bereft of any human pres­ence — and in so doing, as Payne explains while exam­in­ing it object by object and art­work by art­work, cre­at­ed what may well be his great­est self-por­trait.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Hen­ri Matisse Scan­dal­ized the Art Estab­lish­ment with His Dar­ing Use of Col­or

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

When Hen­ri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swim­ming Pool, So He Cre­at­ed a Swim­ming Pool as a Work of Art

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion Les Fleurs du Mal

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break­down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.