THE BLUE WINDOW
HENRI MATISSE, 1913
This whole thing is blue. Not mostly blue. Blue. The walls, the table, the trees, the sky, even the moon up in the corner. One deep dreamy shade, top to bottom. A window is the one thing in a house built to show you somewhere else. Depth, distance, the world beyond it. So watch what he does with it. Try to find the window here. The line where the bedroom stops and the night begins. You can't. The dressing table up front and the garden out back are the exact same blue, so they just melt together. A perfume dish and the moon, made of the same stuff. Inside and outside quietly become one thing. And it's a real place. This is the Matisses' bedroom at night, and that's his wife Amélie's dressing table. Her flowers, her green lamp, her little brooch in a dish down in the corner. The most ordinary spot in the house, soaked in blue until it turns into a dream. Which, funnily enough, the Nazis couldn't stand. They pulled it off a museum wall in Germany and branded it degenerate. A painting of some flowers and a 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. Which means somewhere near here, you can step inside it. Same building, painted wall to wall red. The Red Studio. This is the only time Matisse ever showed it from the outside. So you're holding both halves of one place. The red room where he worked, and the blue night he looked at it from.