Eleven paintings, one painter
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Galleries, on MoMA's fifth floor, hold the permanent collection of art from the 1880s to the 1940s. Room 506 is the exception: rather than mixing artists by period, it is reserved for Matisse alone, with eleven canvases covering his most experimental period, between 1907 and 1916.
1. The Red Studio: a space repainted in the single colour of memory
Painted in Issy-les-Moulineaux in the fall of 1911, The Red Studio shows Matisse's workspace almost entirely submerged in a uniform red — floor, walls and furniture blurred into a single hue, though the actual room had grey walls. The painting shows six paintings, three sculptures and one ceramic by Matisse himself, arranged as they were in the real studio — as depicted, this is the same grouping of objects Matisse had around him at the time he painted them together.
In 2022, MoMA tracked down and reunited nearly all of these original works for an exhibition devoted to the painting — the first time these objects had been physically together since Matisse's studio, more than a century earlier. Before then, the canvas changes hands several times: bought in 1927 by David Tennant, founder of London's Gargoyle Club, it hangs on that nightclub's walls for nearly fifteen years before being bought by a New York dealer. MoMA acquires it in 1949 — nearly forty years after it was made, and after spending far longer on a nightclub wall than in a museum.
2. Dance: a sketch for Moscow, refused then adored
In early 1909, the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, who had followed Matisse's work since meeting him in 1906, commissions two large decorative panels for the staircase of his mansion: one on dance, the other on music. Dance (I), held at MoMA, is the 1909 preparatory sketch for this project — the larger, more vivid final version leaves for Moscow in 1910 and is now held at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
When Shchukin sees the finished version on its arrival in Moscow at the end of 1910, he first cables Matisse to refuse both panels, finding them too bare for his staircase. He changes his mind within days and accepts them after all, later calling them "the most beautiful paintings in my collection." MoMA's sketch, without the revisions and the scenes Matisse would paint with no preparatory drawing at all for the Music panel, still carries the trace of this hesitant beginning.
How much time
The room can be crossed in a few minutes, but the two main canvases are worth lingering over, and the room's nine other Matisse paintings — including Dance and The Piano Lesson — round out a decade of experimentation.
- The Red Studio — 10 minutes.
- Dance (I) — 8 minutes.
- The rest of the room — 10 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against MoMA's collection pages (moma.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- MoMA — Henri Matisse, The Red Studio
- Washington Post — Matisse's Red Studio ignites a display at MoMA
- MoMA — Henri Matisse, Dance (I)
- Wikipedia EN — Dance (Matisse)
- Wikipedia EN — Music (Matisse)
Displays and room openings can change. Check the MoMA website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
