78 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
THEA RT WORLD
GOING FLAT OUT
The revolutionary charge of Henri Matisse.
BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
the curators Ann Temkin, of MOMA,
and Dorthe Aagesen, of the National
Gallery of Denmark, immerses a viewer
in the marvels of an artistic revolution
that resonates to this day.
Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. Aesthetic bliss
saturates—radically, to a degree still apt
to startle when you pause to reflect on
it—the means, ends, and very soul of a
style that was so far ahead of its time
that its full influence took decades to
kick in. It did so decisively in paintings
by Mark Rothko and other American
Abstract Expressionists in the years after
MOMA’s mid-century acquisition of “The
Red Studio,” which had, until then, lan-
guished in obscurity. The works that are
visually quoted in the piece—seven paint-
ings, three sculptures, and a decorated
ceramic plate—cohabit with furniture
and still-life elements. Contours tend to
be summarily indicated by thin yellow
lines. Part of a pale-blue window ob-
trudes. But nothing disrupts the com-
position’s essential harmony, the details
striking the eye all at once, with a con-
certed bang.
There’s no possibility of entering the
portrayed corner space, even by way of
imagination. Only certain subtle con-
trasts of warm and cool hues, pushing
and pulling at a viewer’s gaze, hint at any-
thing like pictorial depth. Not for Ma-
tisse the retention of visually advancing
and receding forms, as in the contempo-
raneous Cubism of his towering frenemy
Picasso. (Who wins their lifelong agon?
The question is moot. They are like box-
ing champions who can’t tag each other
because they’re in separate rings.) Even
the vaguely Cézanne-esque “Bathers”
(1907), picturing a nude couple in a grassy
landscape—one of the paintings in “The
Red Studio” whose original is on hand
for the show—reads democratically. Swift
strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit
rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so,
as your gaze segues smoothly across black
outlines among greenery, blue water and
sky, and orangish flesh.
In 1907, when Picasso painted his
insurrectionary touchstone “Les Demoi-
selles d’Avignon,” the Spaniard com-
mented acerbically on Matisse’s break-
through canvas from the same year, “Blue
Nude (Souvenir of Biskra)”: “If he wants
to make a woman, let him make a woman.
If he wants to make a design, let him make
a design.” In truth, Matisse did both at
once, integrating painting’s two primor-
dial functions—illustration and decora-
tion. “Blue Nude” is absent from “The Red
Studio” and from the present show, but
its spirit persists in the three sculptures
on display, which extend, in the round,
the painterly touch in Matisse’s flat pic-
torial figuration. They nearly equal, for
me, the twentieth-century feats in three
dimensions of Brancusi and Giacometti.
T
he inception of “The Red Studio”
came by way of a decorative com-
mission from the Muscovite textile ty-
coon Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a preëm-
inent collector of European innovations,
from Impressionist to Post-Impressionist
“ Young Sailor II” (1906) is one of the works Matisse copied in “The Red Studio.” to some on which the paint was barely COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
H
enri Matisse’s large painting “The
Red Studio” (1911) is so familiar
an icon of modern art that you may
wonder what remains to be said—or
even noticed—about it. Quite a lot, as
a jewel box of a show at the Museum
of Modern Art proves. The exhibition
surrounds the eponymous rendering of
the artist’s studio with most of the eleven
earlier works of his that, in freehand
copy, pepper the painting’s uniform
ground of potent Venetian red. (Some
of the original pieces are on loan from
institutions in Europe and North Amer-
ica.) In addition, there are related later
paintings, drawings, and prints, along
with abundant documentary materials.
The ensemble, eloquently mounted by
