The Red Studio

Henri Matisse · Issy-les-Moulineaux, fall 1911

You're looking at The Red Studio. Matisse painted his own studio at Issy — and then painted over almost all of it in a single flat red, walls and floor and furniture alike, so the room stops being a space and becomes one continuous field. What he left alone are his own paintings, hanging on those walls in their own colours, and a few thin outlines where the furniture used to be. The room is dissolved; the art in it is not.

Medium Oil on canvas · Dimensions 71 1/4" x 7' 2 1/4" (181 x 219.1 cm) · Credit Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund

Hanging beside it in Gallery 506: Landscape at Collioure, Composition

Works like this one elsewhere in the museum: Saturday Night in a New England Kitchen, Untitled, Untitled (International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris), Measurement Room, The Heiress, TV-Dé-coll/age, no. 1

More by Henri Matisse here: The Back (I), The Back (II), The Back (III), The Back (IV), Tiari, Dance (I)