At the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Matisse sees red in a historic exhibition

What happened to him? Why the hell did Matisse suddenly see red, drowning his canvas under this brick shade who spares no detail? In that winter of 1911, he himself seemed stunned by his gesture. The floor and walls are red; the tables, the chair, the vase and the chest of drawers are red. The radicalism is total. The Red Workshop is a revolution. “This painting did not turn out as I had imagined it at the start,” the artist confided to the Hungarian writer Vilma Balogh at the dawn of 1912. “I like it, but I don’t understand it completely. do. I don’t know why I painted it exactly like that. »

It would be almost unconsciously that the painter then at the top would have made this canvas the laboratory of all experiments who will found the adventure of modern art? With this burst of brilliance, he disrupts the cursors of our gaze. Even today, the astonishment remains, caused by this all-over before its time. Certainly, this is one of his most sophisticated paintings: a abyss for the eyes. The physical place disappears under the invasion of Venetian red to give way to a mental spaceboth plane and deep, finite and infinite.

A lightning gesture

“For the subject of bedroom decorations, you can take whatever you want (figures, landscapes, still lifes) even a little (but little) of the nude. »

The work was painted during the year 1911, in the studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux where Matisse has just moved. The first custom-made home he was able to afford, with its greenhouse surrounded by inspiring gardens. Matisse is 41 years old and already a great career. His Fauvist revolution, at the beginning of the century, opened him up to color upheaval. Since then, he has invented strange Arcadian scenes, reaching new heights with his two versions of the Dance.

It is this stylist of a certain joie de vivre that we find in this pre-war winter. Once again, he reinvents himself with a lightning gesture. The Russian tycoon Sergei Shchukin ordered him. He is enchanted by the Dance that he has just acquired from Matisse, this round of orange bodies which float on a green and blue background. As a faithful collector, he seeks companions worthy of his audacity. About the three panels he commands to the painter, he leaves carte blanche : “For the subject of bedroom decorations, you can take whatever you want (figures, landscapes, still lifes) even a little (but little) of the nude. » Thus is born theRed workshop.

The works of the painting brought together