Oil on canvas
This is the only painting in which Matisse depicted the exterior of his Issy studio. The Blue Window was made in Henri and Amélie Matisse’s second-floor bedroom in their house on the adjoining lot. The view through the window shows the studio nestled in the surrounding trees (painted blue, like the dressing table, wall, and sky). The studio’s distinctive pitched roof and chimney are also blue, while the yellow of the building’s exterior links it to the objects on the table. In one flat plane, Matisse connects inside and outside, home and work, life and art.
Matisse: The Red Studio, May 1–September 10, 2022
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
The artist, Paris
1913 Karl Ernst Osthaus for the Folkwang Museum Hagen, Germany
1922 Folkwang Museum, Essen
1937 removed as "degenerate art" (by Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), 1937
1938 legally seized by the German Reich under the Law on the Confiscation of Products of Degenerate Art of May 31, 1938 (Gesetz über die Einziehung von Erzeugnissen entarteter Kunst), RGBl. 1938 I, p. 612
1939 on consignment to art dealer Karl Buchholz, Berlin
Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York
April 13, 1939 The Museum of Modern Art (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund)
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Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954 428 works onlineThroughout his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, Henri Matisse continuously searched, in his own words, “for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.
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Henri Matisse
Gallery 506Henri Matisse’s audacious experimentation with form and color was inseparable from his dedication to an art of harmonious expression, an ambition lost on most of his contemporary viewers.
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