“Open Window, Collioure” (1905).Artwork work by Henri Matisse / Courtesy © 2026 Succession H. Matisse / ARS / Nationwide Gallery of Artwork
In “Femme au Chapeau,” at the very least a 3rd of the composition is chapeau—and this specific hat is extra of a mangled fruit basket, by which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue protruding of the highest would possibly belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could possibly be an apple, however they possible aren’t. We’re wanting by means of the eyes of somebody who doesn’t need to truly see the hat. Matisse’s challenge was to wrench the looks of issues, notably their colours, away from actuality, and to allow them to entertain a brand new inside correspondence guided by his expressive whims. It’s a infantile strategy to thank the world for its visible bounty, however he knew that. Reminiscing about his summer season with Derain, Matisse mentioned, “We have been at that time like youngsters earlier than nature, and we let our temperaments converse. . . . I spoiled all the pieces on precept, and labored as I felt, solely by shade.” The will to spoil, to transgress on precept, to épater le bourgeois—these are the phrases of the avant-garde artist.
There’s a well-manicured story about Matisse changing into a contemporary painter—the drift from conservative academies and salons towards eccentric splinter teams; the pixelated brushwork transmitted by means of Paul Signac; the seductiveness of Cézanne; the plunges into southern gentle in Corsica, Saint-Tropez, and Collioure—however I fear that this sketch has numbed us to the precise case of “Femme au Chapeau,” which is rather more temperamental and, nicely, freakish than what the artist made earlier than and after. Matisse spent months engaged on a unique portray for the 1905 Salon d’Automne: a panorama, crammed with formulaic dashes and punctiliously modulated shade contrasts, known as “The Port of Abail.” He tossed it apart and in a matter of weeks whipped up “Femme au Chapeau” as an alternative—the brilliance of 1 portray launched by the frustration of one other. Within the years on both aspect of “Femme au Chapeau,” Matisse painted two Arcadian fantasies, “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” (1904) and “Le Bonheur de Vivre” (1906), that present his fashion trending towards flat, simplified types and liquid arabesques. These work affirm Matisse’s repute as fashionable artwork’s final pleasure-seeker—the person who famously mentioned that artwork ought to be like a “good armchair,” and whose studios had an inclination to evaporate the garments of girls.
The portrait of Madame Matisse, in contrast, is an anxious smear job. Typically, a portray’s Fauvist credentials depend on at the very least three elements: the usage of nonmimetic shade (e.g., no worldly pores and skin tones or blue water); the distinction of complementary colours to stability the image (pink and inexperienced, orange and blue, and so on.); and the flat software of “pure” shade, versus delicate shades, with every patch marking a Cézanne-like shift in airplane (i.e., hue, greater than line, structuring the area). What’s odd is that Matisse’s portray doesn’t abide by any of those guidelines, at the very least not fully. In contrast to his different high-Fauve entry within the 1905 salon, “Open Window, Collioure,” which makes use of a palette of pinks and mint greens to determine clear contrasts, “Femme au Chapeau” permits no simple pleasures. The portray is crammed with inconsistencies and weird compensatory strikes. Its angle might be summarized by a single sq. inch on the base of Amélie’s neck, the place one finds eight colours in competitors: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and a few black, as underdrawing.
