The Red Studio

Henri Matisse, 1911 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

Imagine Matisse in his studio. Before the red. He's already painted the room once. Blue walls. Pink floor. Yellow furniture. The real walls were white, by the way. He lives with the painting for a while. Then he goes back and does the thing that should wreck it. He covers almost the whole room in red. Not red in the room. Red as the room. Look what he doesn't paint over. His own art. The paintings and sculptures keep their colors while the room around them goes red. But why red? Right after he finished it, a visitor came by and went looking for the red wall. Matisse told him, "This wall does not exist at all!" Where the red came from, he said he didn't know. But he said everything in there only became what it was together with the red. So, let the red hit you first. Then you start finding things. The table. A green plant in a bottle. The chair, barely more than a line. The clock with no hands. And all these paintings inside the painting, still in color. Now, the man in Moscow who'd ordered it never saw the canvas. He asked for a little watercolor of it instead. Matisse sent one, with a letter. The red, he wrote, was a "harmonic link." The man wrote back: "It must be very interesting, but I now prefer your paintings with figures." Matisse kept it for about fifteen years. Then it drifted. Ended up on the wall of a London nightclub, the Gargoyle. Eventually it came to this museum. And when it did, a painter named Mark Rothko started coming here. Just to stand in front of it. For hours. He said when you looked at it, you became the color. You became totally saturated with it.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 506