When Matisse presented Femme au chapeau – a brightly coloured, loosely painted portrait of his wife, Amélie – at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905, it instantly split opinion. Nowhere is this clearer than in the response of Leo Stein, who called it ‘the nastiest smear of paint [he] had ever seen’ before acquiring it with his sister Gertrude a few days later. An early masterpiece of what soon became known as Fauvism, the painting became a cornerstone of the Steins’ collection in Paris. SFMOMA’s relationship with the painting goes back nearly a century: a year after the museum opened, it staged a major Matisse exhibition and put Femme au chapeau on the cover of the accompanying brochure. This exhibition recreates the 1905 Salon as faithfully as possible, displaying Matisse’s painting, which the museum acquired in 1991, alongside work by Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain (16 May–13 September). It also explores the painting’s influence on San Francisco Bay Area painters such as David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Brown.
Find out more from SFMOMA’s website.
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