Artist, Faith Ringgold: I love that red that he dances around with.
Curator, Ann Temkin: The way Large Red Interior connects to The Red Studio is, for me, an intensely moving aspect of Matisse's artistic evolution. It's actually his last finished oil painting, and it seems that Matisse returned to The Red Studio.
He became as radical again in his 70s as he was almost 40 years earlier. The surfaces became so bright and so exploding with color. This whole device of putting his own artworks in his own art becomes the grand structure of this painting. As with The Red Studio, it too depicts a corner. So that line that you see between the ink drawing and the painting is actually the corner of his room.
Writer, Claire Messud: Matisse always started from observation. Then what can you still do? What are the freedoms that you nonetheless have?
I always say this with my students when they're writing: you can set something in an entirely different world, but you can also take what's there and just imagine that you're a couple of inches above the ground. That gives this possibility for all sorts of things to change. You're opening reality to possibility.
Matisse is inspiring as someone who kept following his own path. And as he grew older, was still pushing himself. What you can see visually is ever greater joy. The color and the vibrancy is everywhere.
Ann Temkin: And even though it's not Venetian red, it's a very bright cadmium red, it's exactly the same kind of all-red feeling that you get. And for me, that fact that his last painting is somehow a look-back at The Red Studio is not a coincidence.