Focus on… “Intérieur aux aubergines” by Henri Matisse

Seeing Intérieur aux aubergines by Henri Matisse on the walls of the Centre Pompidou – even briefly – is an event of real consequence. On loan from the Musée de Grenoble, the painting was executed in a fragile glue-based tempera that almost never leaves its home and has not been shown in Paris for nearly three decades. Its last appearance here dates back to 1993, in the landmark exhibition Henri Matisse 1904–1917. Yet rarity alone does not account for the excitement. This interior ranks among Matisse’s most pivotal works – arguably the most important painting held today in a French public collection, as the poet and critic Dominique Fourcade once wrote to Clement Greenberg.

There are compelling reasons for such claims. Painted in 1911 – a decisive year for Matisse – the work appears at the moment when his art snaps into focus, reaching its most concentrated and incisive form. It belongs to the quartet Alfred Barr would later call the “Symphonic Interiors”, and Interior with Aubergines is among their most audacious. Its scale alone – exceptional for Matisse – reads like a manifesto. The composition teems with ideas: painting reflecting on painting, an image probing the future of images themselves. And then comes the sensory charge – a lavish outpouring of form and colour, of symphonic accords both explosive and hushed, of supple and sensual flesh tones. Everything seems to surge forward with exuberance, an unfiltered burst of youthful energy.

Everything pointed to the canvas asserting itself as a major milestone of modernity. When Matisse described it as an “important decorative work”, he meant it in the strongest sense. Decorative was not a mild qualifier but the rallying cry of a revolution – one that sought to bind life and images more intimately, more intensely, or rather to rethink the very act of image-making. The painting quickly became a magnet. Artists, critics, and collectors made their way to Matisse’s studio – first in Collioure, then in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Among them were Sarah and Michael Stein, who acquired the work in the autumn of 1911 and soon displayed it in their rue Madame salon.

Yet uncertainty lingered. Matisse added a floral border, removed it, introduced another, then stripped it away again when he repurchased the painting from the Steins, probably around 1917. Did something about this long-pursued work – into which he had poured both affection and tenderness (one thinks of Baudelaire confronting Les Fleurs du mal), but also a measure of unease – give him pause? Nothing ever seemed fully resolved, as if the painting provoked alternating impulses of attraction and resistance.

Even the handling of paint conveys urgency, almost a kind of agitation. There is an insistent drive to load the surface with material presence: using distemper to saturate the image with matte substance, to anchor ornamental form in matter – in short, to wrest the image from unreality, even at the risk of its erosion.

Then, in 1922, Matisse sent the painting to the Musée de Grenoble. It was an honour: at the time, it was the only French museum to own one of his works – albeit a minor one – thanks to the young curator Andry-Farcy. The donation of the large Intérieur was therefore both a bold gesture and a sign of gratitude. Yet it was also, in a sense, a form of relegation. Permanently stripped of its border, the painting’s fragile surface remained constantly vulnerable.

As a result, the work slipped into relative obscurity in Grenoble: rarely reproduced, seldom shown elsewhere. It remained largely overlooked until 1974, when Dominique Fourcade published a striking essay in the journal Critique entitled Rêver à trois aubergines. The article proved decisive, orchestrating the return of Intérieur aux aubergines to the forefront of the modernist canon.