Influences on Matisse's "Red Studio"

It is possible to detect traces of several different styles of art from various periods in Henri Matisse's 1911 painting Red Studio (oil on canvas, 71 1/4" x 86 1/4"). In some cases these traces are the sign of direct influence. An example of this is the influence of artists, such as the nineteenth century painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt, who first integrated ideas from Japanese art into the Western tradition. A second example of an immediate influence is the use of intense, unusual colors as a means of emotional expression found in the work of Vincent van Gogh and other Post-Impressionist painters. Other relationships between Red Studio and earlier art seem to be purely coincidental. The simple lines of many of the objects in Matisse's painting, for example, bear similarities to Greek red-figure vase painting from the early classical era. But there are also cases where Matisse may be said to respond to the Western tradition. One example of this would be his use of one-point perspective which resembles the attempts of early Renaissance painters in Italy but also deliberately plays with the convention, distorting it in order to achieve a different effect from that desired by its inventors. Matisse's painting, therefore, reflects the cumulative effect--both deliberate and incidental--of many centuries of Western art.

The relationship between Matisse's painting and Greek vase painting is not strong. But there is a similarity in the way the red figures were simply

Related Essays

German Expressionism Ger .... Gaugin, Klimt, Matisse and the Pauve artists (Ibid. 20). The drawings on Page 6 reveal the unique melding of Kirchner's assimilation of the influences of other .... (2935 12 )

Armenian Art: Gorky and Saryan Int .... French painting. Matisse and Gaugin, far more than Picasso and Cezanne, were influences of significance to Saryan. It is certainly .... (3546 14 )

Two Faces of Armenian Art: Gorky and Saryan Int .... French painting. Matisse and Gaugin, far more than Picasso and Cezanne, were influences of significance to Saryan. It is certainly .... (3546 14 )

Proto-Abstract Expressionism .... therefore, pays special attention to the transformation of early influences as in .... Rothko's Subway Scene (1938) (Fineberg 107) and Avery's Matisse-like Interior .... (2695 11 )

Lee Krasner Exhibition .... from other schools ("Lee Krasner" 4). Krasner displayed these influences freely, with some of her work amounting to homages to painters such as Henri Matisse. .... (2425 10 )

eing exposed to such a room. Thus by merely indicating the rudiments of the convention that is used to indicate interior space Matisse drew on the viewers' built-in knowledge of it without having to follow through on the creation of a realistic room. It was not important to Matisse to create an accurate replication of a room because he was more interested in expression than pictorial realism. Other techniques that increased the expressive content of his painting include his flattening of space and the intensity of his color. Important changes in European artists' conceptions of composition and space came about through the study of Japanese prints by some of the French painters associated with Impressionism. The American painter Cassatt was one of the most important students of this exotic style and her prints and paintings demonstrate ways in which Japanese notions could be integrated into Western painting. Cassatt's The Letter (1890-91, drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper, 34.5 x 21.1 cm) is an example of this kind of work. In this piece the artist used the overall pattern of the wallpaper to bring the background forward and treated it with an intensity nearly equal to the woman's dress. She also reversed the gener

Category: Arts - I