Matisse’s Ugliest Painting

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.