The Red Workshop inspired countless American abstract painters, something Henri Matisse did not know when he painted this work in 1911, is on display at the Vuitton Foundation in Paris, where it could reveal some of its secrets. The exhibition brings together for the first time all the works present in this painting. Some are famous, like The Young Sailor II (1906), exhibited in France for the first time in 31 years. Others are less so, like Corsica, the old mill (1898). To be seen from May 4 to September 9, 2024.
The plate painted by Matisse in 1907 appearing in the foreground of The Red Workshop It comes from the MoMA collection like the painting itself, acquired by the New York museum in 1949 and which is one of its most prestigious works, according to Ann Temkin, its chief curator. Unpublished archival documents and other works shed light on the context of creation of this “enigma painting”according to the expression of the general commissioner Suzanne Pagé, such as The Blue Window (1913) exhibited at MoMA and Large red interior (1948) which comes from the Museum of Modern Art at the Center Pompidou.
The exhibition opens with a sentence from Matisse explaining to his Russian patron, Sergei Shchukin, that he had made “something new”. “Shchukin ordered him, bought countless paintings, including “The Dance and “The Pink Workshop”, but this time he refusessays Suzanne Pagé. In its first phase, the workshop walls were blue with green stripes, the floor pink and the furniture ocher, representing an interior with a traditional outlook. Matisse let it rest for a month and he will cover it entirely with Venetian red very quickly with a very feverish technique.she elaborates.
Matisse “didn’t explain it very well himself. He had a revelation”. The table will “manifesto function for all American expressionist artists and the following generation, such as Mark Rothko then Ellsworth Kelly. Representation is abolished in favor of abstraction”, adds Ms. Pagé. At the time, she points out, “everyone thought that Matisse was falling into a kind of wandering”.
Shown in London, it received a very cold reception, as in New York, Boston and Chicago later, at the prestigious Armory Show. It ended up in a private club in London before being sold to a New York gallery owner in 1940, then entering the MoMA in 1949.
“The history of art would not have been the same without him. It is one of Matisse’s most daring paintings, which he made at the dawn of his 40th birthday, and it is a moment of experimentation in his work that most influenced the history of art for the rest of the 20th century”assures Ann Temkin, chief curator of MoMA. “When he arrived at MoMA in 1949, it was at the time when artists were starting to use very large formats with paintings full of color. It is said that Rothko’s wife complained that he was always going to admire “The Red Workshop”, to which he would have replied that, without him, she would not have the house in which she lived, a way of saying that he himself would not have had the career that he has had”she confides.
Alongside Matisse, the foundation is presenting an exhibition dedicated to an American abstraction artist, Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), the largest of this scale organized in Paris where he lived for several years, entitled Shapes and Colors, in collaboration with the Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland). Known for his monochrome works, halfway between painting and sculpture, Ellsworth Kelly also designed the decor of its auditorium for the Vuitton Foundation, just before he died.
