Looking at Henri Matisse’s 1911 painting L’Atelier Rouge, or “The Red Studio,” feels like viewing art from the inside of a burst blood vessel. Opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art and running until September 10, the show, “Matisse: The Red Studio,” is curated by Ann Temkin. The show is an artistic reunion reminding that, before Meta, art was a passkey to the original metaverse of alternative realities.  

“Matisse” is also a rare show that offers both pleasure and philosophy. It gathers together the signature painting, which depicts a studio that Matisse had built in a village outside of Paris, with an array of objects that populate the canvas. Six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic are shorthanded on the canvas and also surround it. The effect is a hall of mirrors and a 360-degree view of an artistic revolution.

First, though, that color. “The Red Studio” is awash to the point of drowning in a hue called “Venetian Red,” so named because of its predominance on the canvases of the Renaissance, where it was whisked with lime white to yield cinabrese, widely applied as the underdrawing on frescos. A 14th century Italian painter and critic, Cennino Cennini, noted that cinabrese “is absolutely perfect for doing flesh.”

Henri Matisse, who lived between 1869 and 1954, is one of the visionaries, along with, say, Pablo Picasso, who made art modern. An early muted style gave way to a Fauvist period — the term means “wild beast” — that featured bright and wild colors. He was at the core of the scene in Montparnasse before World War I, and became a magus of southern France, living and creating for years outside of Nice. 

By 1911, when Matisse painted “The Red Studio,” his early work was behind him. It was a time for boldness. The red was a late addition to an otherwise more conventionally colored canvas, a flood of pigmentation that is the equivalent of an officer worker rendering their cubicle in neon hues. The Old Master artistic trope of the artist studio is remade in red.

I recommend starting outside-in, beginning with the other work and then finding them in miniature in “The Red Studio.” Start with “Nude with a White Scarf,” which previews red while also ravishing it with a body of arresting charisma. An earlier work, “Young Sailor II,” is almost psychedelic, portraiture en route to Picasso’s Cubism. In Le Luxe (II), bathers lounge and stretch titanically. 

The show’s curator, Ms. Temkin, told the Sun in a conversation — we were in the shadow of another painting, “Nasturtiums with the Painting ‘Dance’ I” — that Matisse was “thinking about how to see the world.” By focusing on one painting and following its lead, she hopes that the show’s visitors feel “close to Matisse” and companionate in his search for a language in the creative hinterland between “description and abstraction.”

To bring the point to life, she pointed an illustrating finger to “Nasturtium,” calling my attention to how in this painting of a painting — “Dance I” is also in MoMA’s collection — Matisse blurs the line between art and life, placing one leg of a table in the art within the art and shading one of the dancer’s hair green and merging it with the flora in the foreground. The effect verifies Oscar Wilde’s maxim that “life follows art.”   

That choreography between art and life explodes in the painting “The Red Studio” itself. The exhibit supplies the blueprints for the actual construction of the space. Matisse’s work takes us inside his creative artery. The painter is not in the painting, but his work is piled into it, trapdoors to a red world. A studio is a place of labor, but it is also where the product of that labor lives until it migrates elsewhere. 

In the case of “The Red Studio,” that migration was replete with twists. For 12 years, it remained Matisse’s private possession, having been spurned by a Russian magnate, Sergei Ivanovich Schuckin, who was its original commissioner and would go on to assemble a collection of 37 Matisse paintings. 

It was a path not taken, as “The Red Studio” in Moscow would have altered the entire course of 20th century art. It ended up in a London nightclub, where it witnessed dining and drinking in the 1920s and 1930s until finding its way to New York and settling in at the MoMA in 1949.    

“The Red Studio” was one of the first but not the last of Matisse’s interest in making art out of the rooms in which he made art. “The Studio under the Eaves,” “The Blue Window, “The Studio, quai Saint-Michel,” “Large Red Interior” — all on display here — are representations of small rooms that open into spiraling dimensions of time and space. 

“The Red Studio” is a herald of the future, anticipating the primordial colors of Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland, as well as something of the rise of Instagram filters and the ability of everyone to depict their ‘“studio” in their own terms. Ms. Temkin points out that this ambiguity — is social media real life? — would have been instantly understandable to Matisse, searcher for a truth more real than mere verisimilitude.