Matisse’s Miracle in Red

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 3rd May 2022

When Matisse’s painted The Red Studio, his adoring patron baulked. Its “flat pictorial figuration” and enveloping Venetian red created “weird spatial architectonics” that, in 1911, were shocking. Ignored for decades it is now thought a masterpiece. Why? Sensing a distant future of contemporary art, Matisse was “an artist turning away from the “real” world of space, structure, color, narrative, surface, and composition — an artist bound for new beauty”. An excellent video with the curator (8 min) is here.