She had also played a vital, almost maternal role in running the chaotic Matisse household, and so might have come across as pretty much an adult, in an era when childhood didn’t last all that long. There’s certainly no hint that anything improper had gone on during the drawing sessions, at least by the weak standards then in force. And, within the logic of Matisse’s art at that moment, he absolutely needed to base his nude on Marguerite, rather than on some model brought in from outside the family circle.
For a while already, Matisse had been struggling to dissolve the boundaries between the “fine art” that had dominated Europe’s elite traditions — the kind of fine art that focused on female nudes — and the decorative objects, and domestic spaces, that seemed to matter in a lot of the world’s other cultures. In a few earlier works, Matisse had depicted his own radically new paintings as props in cozy domestic still lifes, aiming for “the productive ambiguity between the artistic and the domestic realms that characterized Matisse’s art throughout his career,” as the MoMA catalog puts it.
In “The Red Studio” Matisse magnifies the effect, depicting a painter’s entire atelier as something closer to a bourgeois living room: He conceals all the practical, almost industrial features he had spec’d out for his new workshop (the MoMA show sets them out) and instead fills its image with the furniture and gewgaws and framed paintings you’d have found in the comfortable Matisse home nearby. That’s where he had posed his kids and wife for that earlier Shchukin commission, “The Painter’s Family,” which Matisse had imagined hanging right beside “The Red Studio” once it arrived in his patron’s home. (In the end, Shchukin turned down the later “Studio” painting, for reasons that aren’t quite clear.)
In “The Red Studio,” Matisse took the homemaking Marguerite of his family painting, identified there by the “marguerites” on her dress, and translated her into his atelier’s artful nude, still recognizably daisied. A central figure from Matisse’s home life, that is, gets to play double duty as a symbol of the grand European tradition. He’s telling us that domesticity is still at hand in the new picture, however much art and its evolution might also be in play.
For all the sex and riotous style in “The Red Studio,” Matisse imagined that it might someday become family fare. Judging by the untroubled pleasure his painting gives us at MoMA, he succeeded.
Matisse: The Red Studio
Through Sept. 10 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400; moma.org.
