Henri Matisse
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting
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The Red Room (also Harmony in Red) (1908). Henri Matisse.
Oil on canvas. 180 cm x 221 cm
Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia
Color became the protagonist in modernity. It was used as a powerful resource to express feelings, moods, and the artist’s subjective view.
Matisse is the great master of color in the 20th century. For three reasons:
- He was the most important figure of Fauvism, and this painting is an icon of the movement. Fauves used pure, strident, contrasting colors to express emotions and create another reality: subjective, autonomous, independent from our world reality.
- Modern painting started to break the traditional rules of perspective and depths, Matisse used color to go beyond: he cancelled the illusion of depth (he returned to two dimensions) by using color with the same intensity in elements that appear in first or second plane, as can be observed in this painting.
- At the end of his career, when it was hard for him to handle brushes, he started to cut painted papers with gouache and made his famous decoupages. He replaced “coloring” with “drawing directly on the color.” A resource which gave wonderful results in a world looking for synthesis when expressing.
Art has changed forever, artists do not reproduce, they express, interpret, invent new universes. There is no motivation to paint things exactly as they are. And for Matisse, color should not be the one reality present us but it should be “thought, dreamed, imagined.”
Recommended links:
Timeline: Moments of Henri Matisse.
“I do not literally paint the table but the emotion it produces upon me.”
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