“I like him, but I don’t completely understand him. I don’t know why I painted it exactly like that. » This confidence made by Henri Matisse on The Red Workshop to a Hungarian writer, shortly after the completion of this painting, says a lot about the audacity of its incendiary color, which seems to have escaped even its author. Do great masterpieces have this virtue of surprising us, even if it means being misunderstood at first? In the case of The Red Workshop, it took almost four decades for this painting, initially rejected by everyone, to end up entering the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where it impressed critics and a whole generation of abstract painters, including Mark Rothko . This chaotic reception is at the heart of the fascinating exhibition-file (1) that the Vuitton Foundation is devoting to this now famous painting, after the MoMA and the National Art Museum of Denmark.
The story begins during the winter of 1911, in the crucible of the new workshop that Matisse had built in Issy-les-Moulineaux, thanks to money from his patron Chtchoukine. He has just gone to see him in Moscow. Two years earlier, the painter had sold him a first painting, Harmony in blue, very decorative. Then he suddenly repainted it red, before sending it to him. “I am looking for strength, a balance of forces”, he then explained to a visitor. And he will start again with The Red Workshop…
A painting without space or time
MoMA restorers, interviewed in a short film, say that this painting first presented blue walls striped with green, a pink floor and ocher furniture. Did it then seem too close to The pink workshop delivered in the spring of 1911 by Matisse to his patron? Maybe. In these two paintings, the artist delivers a sort of manifesto. Having finally achieved recognition and a certain financial comfort, he allows himself to look back on his evolution. Suspending time, he shows in The Red Workshop his grandfather’s clock, without hands. Then he represented 11 of his works there, 10 of which are today gathered at the Vuitton Foundation (the eleventh was destroyed).
The oldest is a small Corsican landscape from 1898, still impressionist, but already showing its tawny palette. The most recent, a painting of cyclamen and a plaster head of Jeannette, dated 1911. Between the two, Matisse planted a portrait of Young Sailor (II) and no fewer than seven nude figures, painted, modeled or drawn on ceramic. Among these obsessive female bodies, the provocative Nude with a white scarf from 1909, preserved in Copenhagen, looks at us while spreading his legs. Painted on an abstract background, carmine and flesh pink, matched to the model’s nipples, its color betrays the intensity of desire that Matisse sublimates with his brushes. Should we see this as one of the keys to the red that will invade The Workshop ? Matisse had also been impressed by certain icons painted on a similar background during his stay in Russia.
The red of an irrepressible fever
In any case, after letting his canvas rest for at least a month, he covers it almost entirely with a Venetian red, which erases the perspective of the workshop and even contaminates some of the works represented, such as the three female nudes of Luxury (II). “He does it almost in one go, in very rapid brush strokes, even leaving hairs in the paint,” noted the MoMA restorers. Like an irrepressible fever. Only one left Red sign (his first title), treated in a very decorative flat color… Chtchoukine, who nevertheless dared to buy Dance And The music, two works of radical primitivism, will stall this time in the face of so much fire. “This red painting must be very interesting, but I now prefer your paintings with figures”he wrote politely to the painter, refusing his canvas.
Exhibited in London then in New York, at the Armory Show, offered to different buyers on both sides of the Atlantic, The Red Workshop does not find a buyer. Too bold for its time. Only the owner of a chic London nightclub, the Gargoyle Club, finally agreed to buy it in 1927. It would sit for around fifteen years in his ballroom, decorated with mirrors, before appearing in 1943 in the window of a London gallery. When the MoMA wanted to acquire it, Matisse, sensitive to this late recognition, would dare to take up the motif of this incandescent closed door in his turn. Large red interior, his last major painting delivered in 1948. A canvas also invaded by the same flatness of an immersive red. Alfred Barr, then director of MoMA, saw it as “an excitement maintained as close as possible to the plane of the canvas”. The burning crucible of creation.
