The First Studio Henri Matisse Invented Entirely for Himself

Following your visit, we have the honor to inform you that we would be able to provide you with a demountable studio based on the adjacent drawing, namely: Dimensions 10 meters × 10 meters, axis to axis, of each post—floor raised by 0.15 meters—height of the walls 5 meters, shed-style roof, the long side about 8 meters, the glazed side 3.50.¹

These are the first lines of a handwritten fabrication proposal sent to Henri Matisse on June 2, 1909, by the director of the Compagnie des Constructions Démontables et Hygiéniques in Paris. The two-page letter outlines the specifications for a freestanding studio to be erected on a parcel of land adjoining Matisse’s newly rented house in the town of Issy-les-Moulineaux, located along the Seine River barely four miles southwest of central Paris. The studio was to be simple in shape and large in size, a square about 33 feet in length and width, with walls 16 and a half feet high.² Its “shed” roof of two slanted sides meeting at an off-center peak would be almost entirely windowed on the shorter side, allowing light from above to flood the interior.

Letter from Lucien Assire, Compagnie des Constructions Démontables et Hygiéniques, to Henri Matisse, June 2, 1909

Edward Steichen. Portrait of Matisse with “La Serpentine.” 1909

This studio would be the first workplace Matisse invented entirely for himself, following a decade spent making art in the proverbial garret, rooms claimed within small apartments, and adapted spaces in two former convents. Perhaps picturesque, those accommodations had been sorely lacking in other respects. Now, at age 39, Matisse had the chance to aim for pure functionality. The studio-fabrication proposal specified an iron framework and a roof of corrugated sheet metal; inside, it called for a wood ceiling, a red fir floor, and fir wall paneling. As the drawing on the first page of the letter makes clear, the panes on the roof would adjoin an equal span of tall glass panes on the contiguous wall; windows would thus define almost an entire side of the studio. On the opposite wall would be a six-and-a-half-foot-wide window and on another wall an equally wide double door, covered by an awning. The whole thing could be delivered and assembled by the builder two months hence.³

The new studio would be very different from any of his previous ones. During most of his early years in Paris, Matisse had lived and worked in cramped quarters at 19, quai Saint-Michel. In October 1905, he would finally rent a separate studio in the Couvent des Oiseaux at 86, rue de Sèvres. The old convent building belonged to the French state, which had reclaimed vast numbers of properties being used by the Catholic Church as a result of a series of secularization laws enacted during 1904–05. The government’s sale of the Couvent des Oiseaux necessitated Matisse’s move, in December 1907, to the nearby Couvent du Sacré Coeur at 33, boulevard des Invalides. This convent offered capacious living quarters (Matisse rented a suite of rooms including a vast parlor) as well as studios and, as of spring 1908, space for the art school he initially had established in the Couvent des Oiseaux. Matisse had set up the school at the request of two close friends: the German artist Hans Purrmann and the American art collector Sarah Stein (the wife of Michael Stein, the older brother of fellow expatriates and collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein). At the Couvent du Sacré-Coeur, Matisse divided one large space between his studio and his academy. The space is generally cited as the convent’s former refectory; Matisse later recalled it as “an old pavilion in the garden.”⁴ The academy quickly expanded into a mecca for international students, mainly from Germany, the United States, and Scandinavia.

Path to the Issy studio. Autochrome. Summer 1917

During the year and a half the Matisse family spent at the Couvent du Sacré-Coeur, their lifestyle was uniquely communal. The convent’s various buildings and large garden, though long abandoned and wildly overgrown, became a bustling center in which there was little or no dividing line between family, friends, and pupils, some of whom rented their own residences and studios in the complex. Purrmann, Matisse’s head of school, lived above him, as did the American painter Patrick Henry Bruce. The sculptor Auguste Rodin occupied the ground floor of what had been the convent’s school, the 18th-century Hôtel Biron (today the Musée Rodin). Rodin had been introduced to the building by another occupant, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, his friend and former secretary. An assortment of other artists, poets, musicians, and actors filled out the community, taking advantage of a rare opportunity for an unaffluent cohort to enjoy a distinguished address in the center of Paris, even if its indoor and outdoor spaces retained few traces of their former glory.⁵

The Matisses’ move from Paris to Issy-les-Moulineaux was prompted by the government’s decision to sell this convent, too, resulting in the delivery of an eviction notice to its occupants in early 1909. Matisse was by now accustomed to the spacious accommodations that the convent provided, as well as to its parklike setting. He knew that he needed to look beyond Paris if he wished to find an affordable equivalent, and by April he had located and decided on the property in the nearby town of Issy-les-Moulineaux.⁶ Its unique advantage was a double lot: one containing the house, and the other providing a site for a studio. The relocation brought Matisse to a small industrial town in which he was one of very few artists. The residential area was located high above the local factories and businesses and was still very lightly populated.

Interior of Matisse’s studio in Issyles-Moulineaux. October/November 1911

The new address in Issy freed Matisse from the constant company that was part of life at the Couvent du Sacré-Coeur. As it turned out, there was no immediate sale of the convent, and Matisse’s school continued on its premises during the 1909–10 academic year. But the artist greatly reduced his commitment, appearing only once a week to critique students’ work. Matisse’s self-enforced withdrawal reflected his recognition that he could no longer expend upon his classes the energies necessary for his own painting. Equally important, the artist’s move to Issy served to distance him from an accumulating set of professional pressures and anxieties apart from those of a teacher. On the brink of turning 40, Matisse was battling widespread disparagement of his work, despite the fervent admiration of his students and a small number of devoted collectors. Only four years earlier, he had risen to avant-garde fame as the leader of the notorious artists known as the Fauves (“wild beasts”), who had horrified the art world with their paintings’ free brushwork and vivid, nonnaturalistic colors. But in 1909 the Parisian art world was firmly in the grip of a then-nascent Cubism, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Matisse’s former Fauve comrade Georges Braque. The move from Paris allowed Matisse to literalize his sense of having been relegated to a position no longer at the center of discussion. The commodious new studio in Issy would provide the setting for what was to be an independent and by no means easy course.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Matisse: The Red Studio.

Matisse: The Red Studio is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark. The exhibition is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, and Dorthe Aagesen, Chief Curator and Senior Researcher, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark; with the assistance of Charlotte Barat, Madeleine Haddon, and Dana Liljegren; and with the collaboration of Georges Matisse and Anne Théry, Archives Henri Matisse, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, and is on view at MoMA May 1–September 10, 2022.