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SPEAKER 1: We're on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern
Art, and we're looking at Matisse's painting
from 1911 called "The Red Studio,"
an oddly empty painting, but not surprisingly a very
red painting, given the title.
And red is normally a color that might
be kind of scary or violent, but it
doesn't feel so here so at all.
SPEAKER 2: No.
And when you see the painting in person,
the red is really kind of a deep red, right?
It's almost a dark red.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
SPEAKER 2: The paintings inside it are bright.
SPEAKER 1: That's true.
SPEAKER 2: And these are Matisse's paintings.
SPEAKER 1: And then there's no sense of violence or fear
at all.
In fact, it feels very contemplative and--
SPEAKER 2: Kind of quiet.
SPEAKER 1: --quiet--
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: --actually.
SPEAKER 2: Well, it's his studio, right?
And he had built this in Issy in a suburb of Paris
beside his house, and this is his private space,
and these are his-- the world that he inhabits,
I think, in some ways very much his interior world.
SPEAKER 1: And he's chosen to make it look quiet
and like an interior contemplative space where
certain things stand out and other things recede.
And maybe he's telling us something
about what's important to him in this personal artistic space--
SPEAKER 2: So what do you see as important?
SPEAKER 1: --maybe the space of his unconscious.
SPEAKER 2: I think that that's right,
because there isn't anything sort of front and center
that's really dominant in this painting.
It's a lot of things in a sense that we can choose from.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
It's almost like he's giving us a little menu--
SPEAKER 2: That's right, or himself.
SPEAKER 1: --without a centralized composition.
Or maybe this is what it feels like in Matisse's head--
SPEAKER 2: Well, that's interesting.
SPEAKER 1: --these little isolated items
that come together in this one space
but without a real focal point.
Our eye moves from the lower left up and around to the lower
right and we kind of follow--
SPEAKER 2: Actually following the clock, right?
SPEAKER 1: That's true, a clock which has no hands.
SPEAKER 2: That's true.
You're right.
I do kind of look at the whole painting
in a kind of clockwise motion.
I start in the lower left.
And I do, I wrap myself around looking
at his paintings and the other things that
actually have color in the canvas.
There's that cutting of nasturtium
in the vase on the table in the foreground.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
And it looks like some crayons maybe, some Cray-Pas
or something like that in the lower right
corner of the table, and the plate and the glass.
SPEAKER 2: That he had painted, it looks like.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
It looks like mostly what we have here are
actual works of art but Matisse himself.
SPEAKER 2: Or the things that he uses to make art,
like the crayons that you pointed out.
And then I think that's a vase of brushes,
perhaps in the background on the bureau.
SPEAKER 1: The chair also kind of stands out.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
And the chair is always sort of funny for Matisse,
because he had made that comment which he got a lot of grief
for, ultimately.
SPEAKER 1: About an armchair?
SPEAKER 2: Yes.
SPEAKER 1: The art being something--
SPEAKER 2: Like in a comfortable armchair.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
SPEAKER 2: That's right.
And there's something, I think, that is very restive here.
That's true.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
When you think about Matisse's paintings,
you can think about a nude-- you almost imagine a nude odalisque
almost or a semi-nude odalisque in that chair.
SPEAKER 2: And there is an odalisque of sorts.
If you look directly above the chair,
there's that brown figure, which is wonderfully pushed over,
leaning, which is actually an actual sculpture that Matisse
had done just a couple of years earlier called "Serpentine."
SPEAKER 1: And we have three nudes in the upper right.
We have, looks like a portrait above the dresser
and a still life above the dresser.
SPEAKER 2: The sailor, actually.
SPEAKER 1: The sailor, right?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: And then we have another image
of nudes leaning against the dresser in the back.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: And then we have another nude--
SPEAKER 2: The large pink one.
SPEAKER 1: --in a chair.
SPEAKER 2: Now the large pink one,
I remember reading-- this is interesting--
that this was a painting that Matisse actually destroyed soon
after this painting was made.
SPEAKER 1: Huh.
SPEAKER 2: "The Red Studio" was made.
And this is actually, in some ways,
I think, the best quality reproduction
we have of its original colors.
SPEAKER 1: And what it looked it.
SPEAKER 2: Unless Matisse was revising it
Because he often did that.
He often in his paintings--
SPEAKER 1: --included other paintings.
SPEAKER 2: And actually created sort
of derivations of those originals in the new paintings.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
The artwork stands out, and the furniture
is almost like a ghost in this space.
So it's like nature, the nude, art are the things that emerge.
SPEAKER 2: And those are one-of-a-kind for Matisse.
I don't think he so much separates art--
SPEAKER 1: I think that's exactly right.
SPEAKER 2: --and nature and the--
SPEAKER 1: The nude.
SPEAKER 2: --the female nude, especially.
SPEAKER 1: Exactly.
SPEAKER 2: I think those are, in a sense,
the same thing for him.
SPEAKER 1: They're synonyms, yes.
SPEAKER 2: It's all about sensuality, visual sensuality.
It's true.
So this painting is about that kind of sensuality,
and yet it's also got these modern interpretations that
are pushed on top of it which are actually
very analytic and very sort of strict.
SPEAKER 1: What kind of interpretations do you mean?
SPEAKER 2: Well, a moment ago you
were talking about the way in which all of furniture
looks as if it's almost ghost-like.
And if you look at it closely it's because--
SPEAKER 1: Let's get up close a little bit.
SPEAKER 2: OK.
If you look at it closely, it's because those white lines
are not actually white.
There's yellow and pale blue and dark blue and green.
And in fact, that's not drawn on top of the red.
The red is actually drawn up to those lines--
SPEAKER 1: Right.
SPEAKER 2: --and those lines are actually
the paint that exists below the plane of the red, which
is on top.
So it's sometimes referred to as a reserve line.
And that's not artistically very difficult to do,
but it's some trouble.
And it was a very specific choice.
SPEAKER 1: And it also sort of indicates
that he really must have thought this whole thing
through before he did it, which sort of belies
the feeling of the painting itself,
which feels more spontaneous.
SPEAKER 2: I think that was a real trait for Matisse.
I think he worked very hard to make things look very easy.
SPEAKER 1: So then the question emerges, why all that effort?
The lines, they look on top, but they're really underneath.
Why would he have done such a thing?
SPEAKER 2: Well, I have my thoughts about this.
And actually, instead of looking at those reserve lines first,
I just want to point out that in the upper right-hand corner
of the painting we're missing a vertical line that
would designate the corner of the room.
SPEAKER 1: You mean the upper left-hand corner.
SPEAKER 2: I'm sorry.
The upper left-hand corner.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
So actually the perspective space
doesn't really make sense there--
SPEAKER 2: No.
SPEAKER 1: --in the upper left.
SPEAKER 2: It's sort of dismantled.
In fact, I think this whole painting
is in large part about this sort of process of dismantling
traditional linear perspective.
Look at the chair in the lower right
corner, the chair with the tall back.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, that doesn't make much sense at all.
SPEAKER 2: No.
As it moves away from us, the seat actually gets wider.
It's in reverse of traditional perspective.
SPEAKER 1: And the table here will certainly have--
SPEAKER 2: The table is awkward.
SPEAKER 1: --multiple viewpoints,
sort of like we're looking down at the table
and across at the room at the same time.
SPEAKER 2: So to go back to this reserve line issue,
one of the issues that I know has been discussed
in relationship to this painting is that the reserve line
is a way of further dismantling our expectations
of linear perspective or our desire
to construct illusionistic space within this canvas.
And the way it does that-- and this is a little bit tricky--
is to--
SPEAKER 1: --take what's underneath and put it on top.
SPEAKER 2: Well, that's right.
The red, which if you look at it as the floor for a moment,
has got to be in back of the table or these chairs.
And the tables and chairs, however,
are actually constructed of paint
that is behind, in back of, literally physically in back
of that red.
So the ground is actually making the figures,
and the figures are actually constructing the ground.
SPEAKER 1: By figures you mean--?
SPEAKER 2: The chair and the table.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
The objects in the painting.
SPEAKER 2: Exactly.
The objects should be in front of the floor.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
SPEAKER 2: But in fact, they're constructed out
of paint that is behind the floor.
And so there is this kind of funny scrambling of the way
the painting is traditionally made
or drawing is traditionally made.
SPEAKER 1: And what's amazing to me
when I think about this is how it
took so much effort to dismantle this tradition.
Although when you think about it, the tradition is,
by the time to get to Matisse, 700 years old, 600 years old,
and so it's not going to take one or two or three years
or a couple of artists to dismantle
a 600-year-old tradition of conceiving of art as something
that is like a window into a realistic world
and linear perspective aids the creation
of that realistic world.
It's going to take Cezanne.
It's going to take Gauguin.
It's going to take van Gogh.
It's going to take Matisse.
SPEAKER 2: And it still doesn't work.
SPEAKER 1: It's going to take Picasso.
SPEAKER 2: And it still doesn't work.
SPEAKER 1: And it still doesn't work.
SPEAKER 2: Because look, when I'm looking at this,
even though I see that there's no line in the upper left,
even though the entire canvas is painted red virtually,
even though we have this reverse of the figure-ground
relationship, even though the linear perspective
of the seat of the chair in the lower right is backwards,
even though we have all these things corrupting,
I still see this space.
SPEAKER 1: So why did he do this?
Is he playing with us?
Is he saying, here's some space, but, no, it's not there?
SPEAKER 2: I think that he wants us to become aware
of the mechanics of--
SPEAKER 1: --of what an artist does?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
And what the process is.
I think he, in some ways, is very modernist because he--
SPEAKER 1: What about our expectations?
SPEAKER 2: I think that's critical here.
And there he is playing with us.