La Musique (1939)

Two women occupy Henri Matisse's square painting La Musique. At left, a figure in yellow sits with one red-orange leg crossing the foreground. At right, a second figure in dark blue holds a golden guitar. An open sheet of music rests below them, while broad green leaves spread across the upper part of the picture. The scene looks still and direct, but the red furnishings, patterned surfaces and overlapping bodies continually redirect the eye. Matisse made this work in 1939. Its home is the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where it is catalogued as La Musique, not the much earlier painting of five musicians made for Sergei Shchukin.^[1][2]

Buffalo records the work as oil on canvas, with a square support measuring 115.25 × 115.25 centimetres. Matisse signed and dated it at lower right. Its accession number is RCA1940:13, and the museum purchased it in 1940 through its Room of Contemporary Art Fund after it had been with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. These facts identify the painting precisely among several Matisse works with musical titles. The women, guitar, score and leafy interior belong to the Buffalo canvas of 1939; the five nude figures against blue sky and green ground belong to a different Music of 1910 in the Hermitage.^[1][2]

What happens in the room?

The title names music, and the visible guitar and open score make the theme concrete. The woman at right holds the instrument against her body; one hand reaches over its curved front and the other rises along the neck. The woman at left has no instrument. She sits upright, her gaze oriented outward, while the open notation lies near the lower edge between the two. The picture does not tell us what composition is written on the page or whether the left figure is a singer, listener or fellow player waiting to begin. It gives enough detail to recognise a musical setting without illustrating a particular performance.^[1]

The two figures have related but different kinds of weight. The left woman's yellow dress and forward red leg anchor the lower-left corner. Her bent arms gather around her body; the red stocking or leg shape reaches diagonally toward the centre. The right woman's broad blue clothing almost fills the opposite side. Her guitar supplies a warm, rounded focus within it. Buffalo's curatorial text describes their poses as complementary. That is a useful way to read the arrangement: one figure is open to the viewer, the other engaged with the instrument; one extends a leg across the foreground, the other folds into a larger dark-blue shape. Neither disappears into the background.^[1]

Green leaves overhead make a loose canopy rather than a measured ceiling. Their large lobes and narrow openings allow dark spaces to appear between them. Behind and around the women, red patterned furnishings establish a more enclosed setting. The image does not need a complete architectural description of walls, floor and windows. A few planes and motifs make an interior plausible, while the leaf pattern and textile insist that the surface of the painting has its own order. It is possible to see the scene as intimate without claiming to know the exact room or the relationship between the two sitters.^[1]

The score is particularly important. It lies tilted in the foreground, its pale pages interrupting the more continuous fields of red, green and blue. The dark signs on the paper register as musical notation, yet are not a legible programme for identifying a piece in the painting. Visually, the rectangle turns the eye back toward the figures and the guitar. It gives the lower part of the composition a small, bright counterweight to the larger guitar body above. The painting therefore uses the materials of music—the instrument and page—as shapes that help make the room coherent.^[1]

The guitar is both an object and a pivot. Its golden front curves inside the surrounding blue. A dark sound hole marks its centre, while its neck rises toward the upper right. The hand, instrument and dress overlap so closely that the viewer moves between following the player's action and reading a sequence of strong contours. This is one way the image stays active without showing physical motion. Its rhythm lies in the recurrence of curves—the guitar, the women's arms, the leaves—and in the sharper lines of the score, furniture and strings. Nothing in Buffalo's record identifies a tune, and the painting does not require one to make its musical theme felt.^[1]

How does the square composition hold together?

A square gives neither figure the natural dominance that a long horizontal picture might assign to a central performer. Matisse has to distribute the women's large shapes across comparable halves. The left woman sits low enough to bring her red leg almost to the bottom; the right woman rises into the leaf canopy and reaches down through blue clothing. The guitar links her upper body to the middle of the canvas. The score then carries attention lower and leftward again. The eye can circulate through the scene without treating one figure as merely an accessory to the other.^[1]

Colour strengthens that circulation. Yellow occupies the left woman's clothing and returns in the guitar's body. Red appears behind each figure and in the striking leg at left. Blue is concentrated in the guitarist's dress, while green dominates the foliage and returns near the lower edge. These repetitions cross the division between the sitters. They make a single colour environment rather than two isolated portraits side by side. Yet the colours do not serve as a literal code for notes or voices. They arrange attention, weight and contrast on a flat surface.^[1]

The red furnishing behind the guitarist is an especially strong intermediary. It rises between the women, densely patterned with lighter marks, and stops well below the green leaves. Its edge creates a vertical pause between left and right, but its colour connects the lower-left leg to the opposite side. A narrow band of pale and dark accents along the back of the room offers another horizontal. Such devices provide a structure the viewer can feel without needing to identify every piece of furniture. The room is convincing as a place to sit and make music because its decorative parts support the two bodies, not because it follows textbook perspective.^[1]

At the top, the leaves do something different. Their repeated cuts and openings create a pattern that spans both figures. Some lobes are broad and nearly flat; dark gaps between them vary in size. This canopy keeps the upper edge lively and counters the more compact forms of the seated women. Its green also moderates the warmer red and yellow below. The result is an image whose main parts can be named quickly but whose balance depends on small changes in direction and interval. The visible ease is a product of relationships made across the entire square.^[1]

That balance was a real problem in the painting's making. Buffalo says Matisse took eighteen photographs of the canvas in progress from 17 March to 18 April 1939. The museum interprets them as evidence of his struggle to keep one voluminous figure from dominating the other and to clarify the work's geometry. The public record does not supply a complete step-by-step caption for every intermediate state, so it would be misleading to claim that a particular arm, leaf or panel was changed on a particular day. What the dated series does establish is that the apparently settled composition followed sustained revision over at least several weeks.^[1]

What do the studies tell us?

The Morgan Library & Museum documents a related 1939 charcoal Study of a Woman. Its exhibition account identifies the woman as one of the two in La Musique. The drawing uses dark and softly worked charcoal, with light areas left for the dress. The Morgan describes it as an exercise in invention and variation before Matisse returned to the painting. This is stronger evidence than a general statement that he must have sketched every detail first. It shows one documented related drawing and a process of reconsidering the figure. It does not name the model or prove that the finished painted outline was copied mechanically from the sheet.^[3]

The drawing and the eighteen photographs answer different questions. The Morgan study shows Matisse working through a woman's form in charcoal. Buffalo's photograph series follows stages of the actual canvas. Together they support a picture of drawing, looking, repainting and comparing relationships across the square. They do not convert the painting into an illustrated technical manual. Without examining all eighteen photographs in their original order, it is safer to describe the documented duration and purpose of the revisions than to invent a detailed chronology of each coloured area.^[1][3]

The Art Institute of Chicago owns another 1939 painting, Girl in Yellow and Blue with a Guitar. Its scholarly catalogue dates it to March at the Hôtel Régina in Nice and relates it to Matisse's renewed habit of repeatedly reworking a canvas. Like Buffalo's La Musique, it joins a seated woman, a guitar and flattened decor. Yet it is a separate, smaller picture with one main figure. The Art Institute's technical investigation explains changes in that particular surface, including earlier positions visible through imaging. Those findings cannot simply be transferred to Buffalo's canvas. The sound comparison is narrower: both pictures show Matisse returning to the guitar and testing how a figure could be held within strong colour and pattern in 1939.^[4][1]

This comparison also helps clarify what is distinctive about the Buffalo work. In Chicago's picture a single guitarist carries the composition. In La Musique, the second woman changes the visual problem. The guitarist can no longer command the square alone; the left figure, crossed leg and score demand equal consideration. Buffalo's account of the photographs confirms that Matisse struggled with precisely this relation of the two large forms. The resulting image feels balanced without making the pair identical. Its apparent calm therefore has a documented history of adjustment behind it.^[1][4]

Is this the same as Matisse's 1910 Music?

No. The title is shared, but date, subject, scale, place and ownership differ. The 1910 Music is the monumental Shchukin panel now in the State Hermitage Museum: five red-orange figures against broad blue and green, made as a companion to Dance. Buffalo's 1939 La Musique is a square interior with two clothed women, a guitar and a score. The presence of music in both does not make the later painting a remake of the earlier composition. The 1910 work relies on bodies separated across an open landscape; the 1939 work brings two sitters and a patterned room into close contact.^[1][2]

Matisse also made a 1907 Music (Sketch), now at MoMA. Its title and date make it another separate object, not an early state photograph of the Buffalo painting. Keeping these three works apart is essential when reading a page simply titled “Music.” A reference to Shchukin's staircase, five nude figures or the commission of Dance belongs to the 1910 work. A discussion of eighteen photographs taken between March and April 1939, two women's poses and Buffalo's 1940 acquisition belongs here. The common musical subject can be explored as a long-running interest, but each object's evidence has to remain with its own canvas.^[1][2][5]

The change between 1910 and 1939 is interesting without turning it into a simple story of progress. In the earlier panel, Matisse reduces the surroundings to a hill and sky, while the bodies are primarily red-orange shapes spread across a nearly four-metre width. In the Buffalo painting, furniture, foliage and clothing are active partners to the sitters within a 115-centimetre square. Each solution gives music a visual form without trying to illustrate sound literally. The contrast shows Matisse returning to a theme with different pictorial questions: first the relation of five figures across a commissioned mural, later the relation of two figures within a densely patterned interior.^[1][2]

What can the painting tell us about music and looking?

Buffalo's account notes that music mattered to Matisse personally and that he played the violin. That biographical fact gives context for his recurring subject; it does not identify the melody on the open score or make the right-hand guitarist a portrait of a particular musician. The painting is most persuasive when music is understood through visible relationships. The score suggests reading, the guitar suggests touch and sound, and the two figures supply a setting in which either listening or playing is plausible. The decorative motifs around them repeat, answer and interrupt one another much as rhythms can, but the analogy remains visual rather than a transcription of actual notes.^[1]

The left woman has a strong place in that experience even without holding an instrument. Her yellow clothes echo the guitar, and her diagonal leg leads toward the paper at bottom. If she were treated as background, the score would lose one of its visual anchors and the broad left half of the painting would become oddly vacant. Buffalo's photographs reveal that Matisse spent time preventing precisely such an imbalance between the two forms. The viewer can now move between them, testing whether the picture feels like a duet, a lesson or simply shared time with music. None of these social stories is documented by the museum; the composition allows them without settling them.^[1]

The painting also rewards attention to what lies between the women. A red vertical, the guitar's gold and a pale sheet at the bottom pull the two bodies into one network. The large leaves above both give them a shared upper frame. Dark outlines clarify the sitters and instrument but do not isolate them from the surrounding patterns. Seen from a distance, the figures, guitar and score hold their places. Seen closer, the small repeats and changes of edge become more prominent. This movement between clarity and complexity is part of the work's effect and a reason to view the original scale as more than a simple square thumbnail.^[1]

Its documented making gives that experience another layer. We are looking at an image that Buffalo says was photographed through eighteen states within roughly a month, not a spontaneous scene fixed in a single sitting. The resulting order is the point. Matisse worked until the figures' relative size, the instrument and the decorated space could coexist in a square that feels immediate. The work's subject may be music, but its particular accomplishment is pictorial: the eye finds a place for each person and object while the colours continue to move around them.^[1]

Where did the painting go?

Buffalo's provenance identifies the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, before the Albright Art Gallery bought La Musique on 27 May 1940. The museum's credit records the Room of Contemporary Art Fund. This short documented sequence connects a French painting of 1939 to its American collection without confusing its acquisition with the earlier Moscow commission. It also provides a stable identifier—RCA1940:13—for readers comparing reproductions or seeking the current museum record. Gallery displays can change, so the owning museum's page is the appropriate source for a visit.^[1]

The painting sits within a wider Matisse paintings story, but its close questions are specific. Why does the woman without a guitar hold as much visual attention as the player? How do the yellow dress and golden instrument relate without merging? Why does the pale score matter so much near the bottom? The answer is in the carefully weighed poses and intervals, and in the record of repeated revision behind their apparent ease. The related 1939 drawing and Chicago guitar picture can deepen that reading, while the 1910 Music remains a separate article about the earlier mural.^[1][3][4]