CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/17/2022

'Matisse: The Red Studio' is NEW from MoMA!

Henri Matisse’s Le Luxe II (1907–08) is reproduced from Matisse: The Red Studio, published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view now at MoMA, which reunites for the first time all of the artworks depicted in the artist’s famous 1911 painting of the interior of his suburban studio just outside Paris. Le Luxe (II) appears in the upper right corner of the painting. “Le Luxe (II) is the second of a pair of paintings of the same subject, in which the modulated tonalities and visible brushstrokes of its predecessor are translated into flat planes of simple color,” Ann Temkin and Dorthe Aagesen write. “For the second version of Le Luxe, Matisse shifted his medium from oil to distemper, which produces a thin and even matte surface. The rendition of Le Luxe (II) in The Red Studio, on the other hand, is heavily worked, with visible brushstrokes and layering of paint. It also represents the most dramatic color shift from the painting on which it is modeled: Matisse has transformed the pale skin of the three nudes, rendering it in the same red as the studio itself, with the result that the painting appears more “in” than “on” the red wall. The change recasts the women as dark-skinned, at a moment in which avant-garde art was raising charged questions around concepts of racial difference and European ideals of beauty. The red-brown earth of Le Luxe (II) has become a rich ocher, and the other colors of the landscape are accordingly intense, the water a deeper green and the sky a darker blue than in the original painting.”