NARRATOR:
Femme au Chapeau, or Woman with a Hat, is a portrait of Henri Matisse’s wife, Amelie, and is today one of the best known works of art in the Museum’s collection. But it caused a commotion in 1905, when the Paris art world came face to face with the bold colors of modern painting in the great annual exhibition, the Autumn Salon. Curator Janet Bishop gives the full story.
JANET BISHOP:
Matisse had been working on a very large landscape at the time and didn’t think that he could finish it. So this painting was actually made in—in some haste. And when his colleagues and the salon president saw the piece, they had encouraged him not to show it, for fear that he would really embarrass himself by putting this on public view. But he went ahead and did it. And the—the critical reaction was—was strong, and one of the critics, Louis Vauxcelles, referred to this painting and paintings by Matisse’s colleagues as les fauves, or wild beasts.
NARRATOR:
The moniker stuck, and today many artists and scholars consider the work of these so-called “Fauvists” to be a turning point in the development of a modern art. But many viewers of his day couldn’t accept Matisse’s riotous colors, and the raw, loose way he applied paint.
BISHOP:
He had been painting with a sort of non-objective palette, using colors that didn’t correspond to observed reality. But it was one thing to do that with a landscape, for instance; but to do that for a woman’s face was really utterly shocking. To use this bold slash of green across his wife’s forehead, a slash of green for her nose, you know, this dab of yellow at—at its tip. Matisse was purportedly asked what his wife would actually have been wearing when she posed. And he replied, facetiously or not, “Well, black, of course.”