She also played a key, almost motherly role in running the chaotic Mattis family, which may have made her seem almost like an adult in a time when childhood didn’t last as long. There is certainly no indication that anything inappropriate was done during the drawing session, at least by the weak standards in force at the time. And within the logic of Matisse’s art of the moment, he needed to base his nude on Marguerite rather than on a model brought in from outside his family circle.
Already for some time Matisse defined the boundary between “art” (a type of art focused on female nudity) that dominated European elite traditions and the ornaments and domestic spaces that seemed important. I was having trouble getting rid of the . in many other cultures of the world. In some of his earlier works, Matisse sought “the productive ambiguity between the artistic and domestic realms that characterized Matisse’s art throughout his career,” according to the MoMA catalogue. and painted radically new paintings of his own as props for cozy, homely still-life paintings. .
In “The Red Studio,” Matisse expands the effect, depicting the painter’s entire studio as approximating a bourgeois living room. He hides all the utilitarian, almost industrial features that he specs for the new workshop (the MoMA show sets them up). Instead, he fills in that image with furniture, trinkets, and framed paintings he would have found in the comfortable Matisse house nearby. It’s where he posed his children and wife for the former Shchukin commission “The Painter’s Family”, which I imagined hanging nearby. (In the end, Shchukin turned down the later “studio” painting, for reasons that are not clear.)
In “The Red Studio” Matisse took the housekeeper Marguerite from among the family paintings, identified by “Marguerite” in the dress, and transformed her into an artistic nude in his atelier. It serves as a central figure in Matisse’s family life, a symbol of a grand European tradition. He says that household chores are still at hand in the new painting, but he may also have a lot of art and its evolution at work.
For all the sex and loud style in “The Red Studio,” Matisse imagined that one day it might be family-friendly. Judging by his peaceful joy, he succeeded.
Matisse: Red Atelier
Through September 10, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400. moma.org.