‘Absolutely enthralling’: why Matisse’s Red Studio still packs a punch

‘It’s not like works are born famous. It may be a few years, many decades, or centuries before it lands on the wall where viewers look at it’ … a person looks at Henri Matisse's The Red Studio Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

The artist’s studio is their world. It’s among their most private places, and in Henri Matisse’s case, it’s as intimate a portrait as viewers can get of an artist who very rarely portrayed himself.

“The studio is the heart of the artist’s life,” says Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis chief curator of painting and sculpture. “It’s not just any interior. It’s the core of what they’ve made their world. When an artist chooses to make a work that’s about the studio, it’s almost by definition a work about art in a much broader way.”