The Red Riot of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was never one for following the rules of the room. He took a canvas that was originally supposed to be a calm blue and decided it needed to scream. In 1908, just before the Salon d’Automne, he painted over the cool tones with a blood-bright crimson. He called it The Dessert Harmony in Red. It was a move born of pure instinct and a refusal to let the eye rest in a world that was rapidly losing its mind.

The painting is a flat-out lie of perspective. The blue floral patterns on the wall do not stop where the table begins. They crawl down the wall and across the linen, turning the three-dimensional world into a single vibrating plane. There is a woman there reaching for fruit and a window looking out at a green garden, but they are just shapes in Matisse’s decorative machine. He was not trying to show you a dining room. He was trying to show you a feeling.

This was the end of the line for the Fauves. The wild beasts had finally stopped biting and started decorating, but it was not the kind of decoration that made people feel safe. It was aggressive. Russian collector Sergey Shchukin saw the brilliance in the chaos and hauled it off to his Moscow mansion. He knew that Matisse had found a way to kill the traditional horizon line. By the time the paint was dry, the world of art had changed. The room was red, the floor was gone, and the only thing left was the color.

References

Matisse, Henri. The Dessert Harmony in Red. 1908. Oil on canvas. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Flam, Jack*. Matisse on Art.* Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Spurling, Hilary. The Unknown Matisse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.