Matisse’s Ugliest Painting

Matisse’s “Femme au Chapeau” (1905), or “Woman with a Hat,” is a strong contender for my least favorite masterpiece of the twentieth century. When it was first exhibited, in Paris, waves of journalists ridiculed it, viewers laughed and jeered, and at least one person tried to scratch it with their nails. More than enough time has passed to wise up to its charms, but I still can’t reconcile myself to the shock of its ugliness. The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus. Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude, called it “the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” That might sound like an insult, but it’s not. After negotiating with Matisse, the Steins bought the painting at full price.

“Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau: A Modern Scandal,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looks at how a single work sparked a mini-revolution in art. The exhibition’s main room partially re-creates the infamous Gallery VII at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, in the Grand Palais, where Fauvism—the gallery was described as the “cage aux fauves,” or “cage of wild beasts”—first congealed into a movement. The room included fifty-five pieces by ten artists, all in their twenties or thirties, most of whom had traded the delicate particles of Impressionist brushwork for meaty strokes of absurd color that corresponded not to reality but to the painter’s own soul. (Or so they implied.)

The entire gallery was a scandal, but the cause célèbre was “Femme au Chapeau”: technically a portrait of Matisse’s wife, Amélie, at age thirty-three. Other Fauves deployed bright, acid colors and sharp contrasts, but their work was either too cozy with Post-Impressionism, as in the wriggling outlines of Maurice de Vlaminck, or too subdued in subject matter, like André Derain’s landscapes, to provoke as much attention. A portrait typically ennobles a sitter—certifying a social rank or commemorating a fondness. When Derain painted Matisse during their fateful sojourn in Collioure, a small coastal village where, in the summer of 1905, they cracked open their palettes and set Fauvism in motion, he gave him warm, peachy skin and a dignified pipe. Not so with Matisse’s portrait of Amélie, whose face is mostly a seasick green. Her spade-shaped jaw and cartoonish eyes barely amount to a likeness. In one sense, “Femme au Chapeau” is a painting about painting: a portrait of someone being devoured by paint, not represented by it. But it’s also a portrait of a hat.

Matisse was no stranger to hats. His grandmothers were hatmakers, his aunts were hatmakers, his mother was a hatmaker, and so, too, was Amélie. She opened her own shop in Paris, on Rue de Châteaudun, the year after she and Matisse married, and they lived in the attic above it. One can imagine the kitchen table littered with bobbins, pins, and feathers, as the paraphernalia of the milliner’s life floated up into their private quarters. These were hard years for Matisse: years of professional failure and doubt, when his father shamed him for being an artist and cut off support; years of bronchitis and insomnia, when Amélie would stay up until dawn and read to him; and years of financial strain, when her trade effectively subsidized his. The hat business sustained Matisse and their three children, at least until 1903, when Amélie, in poor health, was forced to close the shop.

Matisse couldn’t have felt neutrally about Amélie making crowns for the same class of wealthy patrons who refused to support him. In the portrait, there’s more than a touch of resentment in the object on her head (Enough with the hats, Amélie!)—it’s ridiculous even by late-Belle Époque fashion standards—and there’s some lingering ressentiment, too. As a law student in the eighteen-eighties, Matisse lived on the sixth floor of a cheap hotel in Paris and would use a glass peashooter to fire little balls of putty at the hats of people on the street below. Even before he was “bitten by the demon of painting,” he chafed at the constraints of bourgeois respectability while feeling compelled to uphold them. Hats were a convenient target.

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims. It’s a childish way to thank the world for its visual bounty, but he knew that. Reminiscing about his summer with Derain, Matisse said, “We were at that point like children before nature, and we let our temperaments speak. . . . I spoiled everything on principle, and worked as I felt, only by color.” The desire to spoil, to transgress on principle, to épater le bourgeois—those are the words of the avant-garde artist.

There’s a well-manicured story about Matisse becoming a modern painter—the drift from conservative academies and salons toward eccentric splinter groups; the pixelated brushwork transmitted through Paul Signac; the seductiveness of Cézanne; the plunges into southern light in Corsica, Saint-Tropez, and Collioure—but I worry that this sketch has numbed us to the specific case of “Femme au Chapeau,” which is much more temperamental and, well, freakish than what the artist made before and after. Matisse spent months working on a different painting for the 1905 Salon d’Automne: a landscape, filled with formulaic dashes and carefully modulated color contrasts, called “The Port of Abail.” He tossed it aside and in a matter of weeks whipped up “Femme au Chapeau” as a substitute—the brilliance of one painting released by the frustration of another. In the years on either side of “Femme au Chapeau,” Matisse painted two Arcadian fantasies, “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” (1904) and “Le Bonheur de Vivre” (1906), that show his style trending toward flat, simplified forms and liquid arabesques. Those paintings affirm Matisse’s reputation as modern art’s ultimate pleasure-seeker—the man who famously said that art should be like a “good armchair,” and whose studios had a tendency to evaporate the clothes of women.

The portrait of Madame Matisse, by contrast, is an anxious smear job. Generally, a painting’s Fauvist credentials rely on at least three factors: the use of nonmimetic color (e.g., no worldly skin tones or blue water); the contrast of complementary colors to balance the picture (red and green, orange and blue, etc.); and the flat application of “pure” color, as opposed to subtle shades, with each patch marking a Cézanne-like shift in plane (i.e., hue, more than line, structuring the space). What’s odd is that Matisse’s painting doesn’t abide by any of these rules, at least not entirely. Unlike his other high-Fauve entry in the 1905 salon, “Open Window, Collioure,” which uses a palette of pinks and mint greens to establish clean contrasts, “Femme au Chapeau” permits no easy pleasures. The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

Part of the greatness of “Femme au Chapeau” is the endurance of its ugliness. Most ugly things are easy to assimilate or neutralize in time. But Matisse made sure to create enough visual friction to prevent that from happening. The composure of Amélie, and the decidedly wild and clownish manner in which she’s painted, can’t be tamed into order, elegance, or beauty. There’s also no golden picture frame or change in fashion that will make the painting’s bourgeois genre (portraiture) comport with its over-the-top accessory (the hat). The hat is destined to be hideous and interesting, and the painting is determined to be too much—too colorful, too self-conscious of its own materials, “excessively modern,” as one person put it. That was in 1905. Lucky for us, the painting still is. ♦