The Pink Studio, and Interior with Auberges – as standing "at a crossroads for Western painting, where the classic outward-looking, predominantly representational art of the past met the provisional, internalized and self-referential ethos of the future"1. The elements Matisse included "sink their individual identities into what became a prolonged meditation on art and life, space, time, perception and the nature of reality itself."2 Or put far more simplistically, he painted a personal reality, the world as he perceived and experienced .
Way that made sense to him. If you look at his Executive List earlier paintings, such as Harmony in Red, painted in 1908, you'll see Matisse was working towards the style in Red Studio, it didn't pop up from nowhere. But the Perspective's All Wrong. Matisse Red Studio Painting "The Red Studio" by Henri Matisse. Painted in 1911. Oil on Canvas. In the collection of Momma, New York. Photo Liane Used with Permission Matisse didn't get the perspective "wrong", he painted it the way he wanted it. He flattened the perspective in the room.
Altered it from how we perceive perspective with our eyes. The question of getting perspective "right" applies only if you're trying to paint in a realist style, that is to create an illusion of reality and depth in a painting. If that's not your aim, then you can't get the perspective "wrong". And it's not that. Matisse didn't know how to get it "right" neither; he just chose not to do it that way. A painting is a ultimately a representation or expression of something recreated in two dimensions, it doesn’t have to do it as an illusion.
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