Henri Matisse,
Dishes and Fruit on a Red and
Black Carpet (Le Tapis Rouge), 1906.

Oil on canvas, 61 x 73 cm.

State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

 

 

Such extreme emotional responses were rare occurrences for Matisse, though. The logic of Matisse’s artistic development can be quite clearly traced even within the limits of the Russian collections. The still life Dishes and Fruit on a Red-and-Black Cloth (1906, Hermitage) heralds the beginning of a period when Matisse experimented with using large areas of colour to construct a space, which was almost as flat as the canvas and yet did not lose the feeling of three dimensions. In Statuette and Vases on an Oriental Carpet the carpet hanging on the wall and covering the table gave Matisse the opportunity to split the space he had created. In this painting the standing objects are the only means used to denote the transition from the horizontal surface to the vertical. However, in Fruit and a Bronze (1910, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) these objects — the jugs, vases, statue, and fruits — become more and more a part of the general ornamental structure, so that this relative boundary dividing the surface is gradually smoothed over, as it were.

This searching process produced the painting The Red Room which optimally attained the target Matisse had set himself. “I want a balanced art which is pure and tranquil. I want a man who’s tired, over-worked, and on his last legs to find peace and repose in my work.”[31] So he said though: “The full potential of colour is only realized when it is organized, when it reflects the artist’s emotional intensity.”[32]