In the Studio in Nice

By 1929 Matisse had spent most of a decade in a rented apartment above the old flower market in Nice, painting the same few rooms over and over. Then he more or less stopped. For about two years he made almost no paintings at all, working instead in clay, etching and lithography, and in 1930 he sailed to Tahiti and then on to the United States, where a collector in Pennsylvania commissioned the huge dance mural that took up the next three years. This studio interior sits right at the edge of that break, with the tall glazed doors of the Place Charles-Felix apartment open on the Mediterranean. Heinz Berggruen, a Berliner who left Germany in 1936 and made his career as a dealer in Paris, kept this one for himself, and Berlin bought his collection from him in 2000.