A mask the friends recoiled from

The Fauve color was attacked, that autumn and after, as outrageous and unnatural, the whole point of the “wild beasts” insult. But The Green Stripe carried an extra offense beyond the color, and it unsettled even people on Matisse’s side. It is a portrait of a real, living woman that makes no attempt whatsoever to flatter her, or even to be warm about her. The mask-like flatness we have been looking at (the refusal of likeness, the green stripe down the nose) reads, to a viewer expecting a portrait, as something close to an assault on the sitter. A friend of Michael and Sarah Stein, the American collectors who would soon own it, reportedly called the picture “a demented caricature of a portrait.”

Then, in 1910, the American critic Gelett Burgess reached for the most loaded reading of all. He wrote that The Green Stripe was Matisse’s “punishment” of Amélie, that the painter had made the viewer “see in her a strange and terrible aspect,” as if the portrait were an act of marital revenge dressed up as art. It is a vivid line, and it has clung to the picture ever since. Treat it as exactly what it is: one 1910 critic’s interpretation, not anything Matisse said or recorded. Much later, the art historian John Klein suggestedthat strain in the marriage might lie behind the portrait’s cold, impersonal, mask-like character. That too is a suggestion, carefully hedged in the scholarship, and it is worth flagging plainly: there is no documented basis for reading this canvas as a record of a failing marriage. The phrase “the painting shows their troubled marriage” is something people say; it is not something we know.

The reading that isdocumented is the artistic one, and it is colder in a different way. As far as the painting’s own logic is concerned, Amélie was simply a model, a face to hang the color experiment on. On this canvas the idea comes first; the green stripe matters more, pictorially, than the woman’s mood. That is the picture’s priority, not a verdict on the marriage, a painter following a discovery wherever it leads, even straight down his wife’s nose.

And because the “punishment” story makes it so easy to flatten Amélie into a long-suffering wife who got a green stripe for her trouble, it is worth ending the chapter with the rest of her. Long before she was anyone’s model she ran her own hat shop in Paris, and once married she became the engine of the whole enterprise, for some four decades Matisse’s business manager, household manager, and chief advocate, the person who kept his career running through the years when nobody was buying. She sat for this picture; she was not done to by it. Whatever a critic in 1910 decided he could see in her face, the woman behind the face was a full partner in the work that made Matisse possible.