L'Atelier Rouge
This conversation is connected to L'Atelier Rouge.
Matisse painted L'Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio) in the autumn of 1911 at his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris. Oil on canvas, roughly 71 by 86 inches. The entire surface is saturated in a single flat Venetian red — walls, floor, and furniture all dissolve into the same color, with the edges of tables, chairs, and a dresser indicated only by thin ochre-yellow outlines. The objects in the room appear to float in the red field. Six of Matisse's own paintings hang on the walls or lean against them, including a large pink nude with blue flowers and several smaller canvases. Two sculptures stand on pedestals at the right. A grandfather clock near the center has no hands. The painting was shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where it failed to sell. It passed through several collections before MoMA acquired it in 1949, where it has been a centerpiece of the permanent collection ever since.