dry. His holdings, which were impounded
by the Bolsheviks in 1918, are now glo-
ries of the State Hermitage Museum, in
St. Petersburg, and the Pushkin State
Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow. They
include an absolute stunner of Matisse’s,
“The Conversation” (1908-12), which I
encountered at the Hermitage in 1989. A
wry air of domestic comedy inflects the
work’s dominant, intense blue and rav-
ishing f loral window view. The artist,
looking mild-mannered and standing in
pajamas, confronts his seated wife, the
formidable Amélie, whom I can’t help
but imagine telling him to get his own
breakfast. (Matisse is almost never point-
edly witty, but a sort of spectral humor,
redolent of sheer audacity, flows through
just about everything from his hand.)
That picture is also not in the present
show, but it is tattooed on my memory.
Shchukin’s lavish patronage of Ma-
tisse, which began in 1906, relieved the
artist and his family from years of pen-
ury. It enabled a move to a comfortable
home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, four miles
outside Paris, and the construction there,
in 1909, of the spacious studio that be-
came the site and ofttimes subject of
nearly all of Matisse’s works until he
decamped to Nice, in 1917. In January,
1911, the collector requested a trio of
same-sized paintings, each about six by
seven feet, leaving their subject matter
up to Matisse. Shchukin acquired the
first, the relatively sedate “Pink Studio,”
but, on receiving a watercolor copy of
what Matisse entitled “Red Panel,” he
politely declined the design.
Shchukin explained that he preferred
pictures with people in them, ignoring
the presence of figures aplenty in the vi-
sual citation of previous works, such as
the robustly appealing “Young Sailor II”
(1906), the original of which is on loan
for the show from the Metropolitan Mu-
seum, and the violently bold “Nude with
White Scarf ” (1909), provided by the
National Gallery of Denmark. Or did
even the gamely indulgent Russian,
though too tactful to say so, balk at the
image’s molten energy? Matisse remained
singularly controversial in art circles at
that time, even as Picasso’s preternatu-
ral draftsmanship disarmed many.
Still called “Red Panel,” the work
appeared in 1912 in the Second Post-
Impressionist Exhibition, in London,
and the next year in the Armory Show,
in New York and Chicago, yet neither it
nor anything else by Matisse sold. (In a
Times interview with the artist in France,
in March, 1913, the critic Clara T. Mac-
Chesney bristled with condescending re-
sistance in face of gracious comments
from Matisse, who was at pains to con-
vey that he was a “normal” family man
rather than the unkempt holy terror
whom she had anticipated.) The paint-
ing then remained in the artist’s posses-
sion and out of public sight until it was
bought, in 1927, as a chic bibelot for a
swanky members-only social club in Lon-
don. After a spell of private ownership,
it was purchased, enthusiastically, by
MOMA, in 1949—right on time for its
charismatic relevance to artists in New
York and ultimately around the world.
In my opinion, there are three dif-
ferently instructive failures among the
works in the present show. “Le Luxe II”
(1907-08) depicts three monumental
seaside nudes, oddly rendered in dis-
temper (rabbit-skin glue) rather than in
sensuous oils, to a dryly static effect. But
it was plainly worth the try for Matisse
and takes its place in “The Red Studio.”
Nostalgia may have motivated him to
incorporate a diminutive clunker, “Cor-
sica, the Old Mill,” painted in 1898, when
he was twenty-eight years old, fresh out
of art school and newly married. Its con-
ventional motif displays an irresolute
miscellany of Post-Impressionist and
incipiently Fauvist techniques—a tick-
ing time bomb, as it would turn out.
It took me a while to cool on the ini-
tially impressive “Large Red Interior”
(1948), which closes the show as a book-
end to “The Red Studio.” Extravagantly
praised at the time by the formalist critic
Clement Greenberg, it is masterly, to be
sure, with virtuosic representations of
previous pictures and lots of flowers in
vases. But I find the work vitiated by a
quality—tastefulness—that Matisse had
sometimes risked but reliably sidestepped
throughout most of his career. It feels
unmeant—passionless, strictly profes-
sional. Soon after completing that work,
Matisse, ever self-aware, put down his
brushes, picked up a pair of scissors, and
commenced the sensational improvisa-
tions in cut colored paper that absorbed
him until his death, in 1954. Yet again, he
found his way to an inward imperative
that, with typical nonchalance, precipi-
tated deathless outward consequences.