A small exhibition at MoMA captures a big moment in Modernism.
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Henri MatissesTheRed Studiois among the most gorgeous lodestars in all of modernism.
Completed in 1911, itdepicts the inner sanctum of his studio in the Paris suburbs.
The studio is filled with paintings stacked in rows and haphazardly hung.
You look around at this art-historical reunion and a long-gone world becomes young again.
It goes off inside you like a depth charge.
(Although dont miss the short video on the conservation of this painting.
It is a lesson in curatorial care and discovery.)
More institutions should consider this scale, the scale at which the work was made.
We witness an artist not only inventing and reinventing himself but reinventing art history as he does so.
In these little spaces, you’re free to almost hear these mighty engines roar.
First the nudes, which were once considered ugly.
it’s possible for you to see why.
Nothing like these had ever existed before.
This is the aesthetic cyclotron Matisse is spinning in these few works.
This is what change looks like in real time.
At first it looks like a folk painting.
Look closer: The pictorial sophistication is off the charts.
We are his and Matisses.
Matisse was 42 when he finishedTheRed Studio, approaching one of the many heights of his optical abilities.
MoMA displays a plaintive letter written by Matisse in which he asserts, The painting is surprising at first.
It is obviously new.
Shchukin quickly turns him down again, going on to write of the weather in Moscow.
Im not sure we recognize just how revolutionary and obviously new this painting is even today.
All this started changing when the older Frenchman paid a visit to Picassos studio.
Their rivalry was one of the most productive and gut-wrenching give-and-takes in art history.
At first, Paris was spellbound.
Soon, however, sides were taken, and Matisse was found wanting.
In Apollinaires sympathetic words, Matisse was one of todays most disparaged painters.
Critics attacked him as old, tame, retired.
After Matisse generously introduced Shchukin to Picasso, the Russian became an avid collector of the Spaniard.
In 1917, Matisse finally left the Parisian fray for the south of France.
Here is the setting for his next incredible campaign into painting.
We see a room with one wooden shutter open.
It blasts beautiful light, a view of the Mediterranean, and a glimpse of a palm frond.
To the left of the window is an armchair.
Forget Picassos fractured guitars heres a violin in an open case.
Originally, this painting wasnt the flaring sunspot it is now.
The floor was pink, the walls were blue, and the furnishings were ochre.
There were narrow slats that may have indicated wood panelling.
Matisse abandoned that approach in search of a new dimensionality different from anything being painted at the time.
The resulting studio is both illusionistic and tangible, rational and insane, almost like a cave painting.
A completely flat ground recedes here, comes forward there.
On the left is a tantalizing glimpse of blue outside a window.
Matisses lines are faint, nearly nonexistent, etched into the blank areas with smudging tools.
You become ultraconscious of every mark and move on the surface.
you could almost reconstruct how this work came into being, whats on top of what.
He leaves all his painterly tracks showing.
This places you in the artists mind as well.
Matisse is not better than Picasso or the other way around.
But Matisseisan opposite of Picasso.
His compositions arent held tightly within the borders of the painting, as Picassos always are.
Elbows bleed off the edges of a Matisse.
