L'Atelier rouge

The Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin commissioned three studio pictures from Matisse in 1911 and happily bought the first, The Pink Studio. This second one he turned down. Matisse had flooded the entire canvas with a single Venetian red, walls, floor and furniture dissolving into one field, with only his own paintings and sculptures left floating in it as islands of colour. Buyers were not ready for it. The picture stayed with him for 16 years, then hung for a while in a London nightclub, the Gargoyle Club, before MoMA acquired it in 1949. The works painted into it were real objects standing around his studio at Issy, and in 2022 the museum gathered the survivors and hung them beside it.