Oil on canvas
"Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things . . . only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." This painting features a small retrospective of Matisse's recent painting, sculpture, and ceramics, displayed in his studio. The artworks appear in color and in detail, while the room's architecture and furnishings are indicated only by negative gaps in the red surface. The composition's central axis is a grandfather clock without hands—it is as if, in the oasis of the artist's studio, time were suspended.
2006
Kids label from 2025
A Splash of Color
This painting shows Henri Matisse’s art studio. It was very important to him. Matisse’s studio wasn’t red, but he liked the way this color connected everything in the painting.
Think about a place that is special to you. How would you paint it?
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This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
1911-1926 With the artist
1926 David Tennant, London (acquired from the artist)
1942 Georges Keller (Bignou Gallery), New York (acquired from the above)
1949 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (purchased from the above)
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Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954 428 works onlineThroughout his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, Henri Matisse continuously searched, in his own words, “for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.
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Modern art
Art made from the 1880s to the 1970s—a time marked by the growth of cities, the rise of industry, a surge in technologies, and the development of mass media.
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Henri Matisse
Gallery 506Henri Matisse’s audacious experimentation with form and color was inseparable from his dedication to an art of harmonious expression, an ambition lost on most of his contemporary viewers.
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