The Blue Window

Henri Matisse, 1913 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

This whole thing is blue. The walls, the table, the trees, the sky. That deep, dreamy blue, right across the picture. Now, a window is supposed to give you a view. You're in here. The garden's out there. Fairly basic arrangement. So watch what he does with it. Try to find where the bedroom stops and the garden begins. There are clues. But that blue keeps getting in the way. The dressing table up front and the trees out back just melt into each other. The tabletop and the sky, made of the same stuff. Once, on the radio, somebody asked Matisse why he kept painting windows. His answer was basically, what inside? What outside? From the horizon right into his studio, he saw it as one space. This is the Matisses' bedroom. That's his wife Amélie's dressing table. Her flowers, her green lamp, her little brooch in a dish down in the corner. All her things, just sitting there. And he's soaked it all in blue. Funnily enough, the Nazis couldn't stand it. They pulled it off a museum wall in Germany and branded it degenerate. Some flowers. A lamp. A little brooch. Apparently, a menace. Anyway. Back in the blue. See that pale building out the window? The one with the dab of yellow? That's his studio. This is the only painting where he showed that studio from the outside. And when this picture appeared in a Paris magazine in 1914, it had a different name. La Glace sans tain. A mirror without the silver backing. Take that away, and you can see straight through it. A window.

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