The Red Studio, 2021, Maya
Painted during the fall of 1911 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a commune in suburban Paris, this year marks the 110th anniversary of Matisse’s original Red Studio. A 2006 gallery label for the painting from the Museum of Modern Art observes that “[t]he composition's central axis is a grandfather clock without hands—it is as if, in the oasis of the artist's studio, time were suspended.”
This interpretation of The Red Studio explores that suspension of time by imagining the painting as an interstitial space, both figuratively and literally within Matisse’s oeuvre; works not painted by Matisse until a few years after 1911 can be found in the left-hand corner of the room, where in the original exist only nondescript swathes of blue in frames.
Fig 1. Side-by-side comparison between rendering and original painting
Fig 2. Detail of the two sculptures in the back right of the painting; updated with 3D-scans from the Museum of Modern Art
The red Chinoiserie wallpaper dates back to 1910 and is French in origin, while the plate on the bottom left as well as the rightmost painting both use the original artworks created by Matisse as mapped textures.
All but one of the artworks displayed in the original painting still exist today in collections around the world. Just as the imagined room constructs a three-dimensional space between the viewer and the contents of the studio, so too is the viewer placed between works created by Matisse both before and after 1911, as well as works both here today and lost to history—as if time were suspended.
Works Cited
Matisse, Henri. The Red Studio. 1911. MOMA, moma.org/collection/works/78389.
Pogrebin, Robin. “A Deep Dive Into Matisse’s ‘The Red Studio’.” The New York Times, 12 Sept. 2021, nytimes.com/2021/09/12/arts/design/matisse-studio-painting-moma-.html.
© 2023 Victor Li