Woman with a Hat

A small portrait of the painter’s wife, her face built of green and mauve, that detonated the first modern-art scandal, and was bought by the two Americans who first called it the nastiest smear of paint they had ever seen.

1. 1
   The green that runs down her nose

   Center of the face, a vertical streak along the bridge of the nose, with a pale blob at the tip

   A long green streak defines the nose, capped by a little blot of pale yellow at the tip. This is the painting’s clearest move into arbitrary color, green where a nose has no business being green. Note carefully what it is and is not: it is a streak running down the nose, not the famous full vertical stripe that splits the whole face into a warm half and a cool half. That stripe belongs to a different 1905 portrait of the same sitter, The Green Stripe, in Copenhagen. People mix the two up constantly. They are sisters, not the same picture.
2. 2
   The forehead smear, a shadow painted green

   Across the forehead, just under the brim of the hat

   A horizontal green smear sits on the forehead, most likely the shadow thrown by the wide hat brim. Except a shadow should be a darker, cooler version of the flesh under it, and Matisse painted it green instead. Color is doing the job of shadow without obeying any of the rules of shadow. Once you see it, the whole logic of the picture opens up: every patch of color is chosen for effect, not for accuracy.
3. 3
   A face built from colors no face has

   The cheeks, lips and chin

   The face is assembled from streaks of green and blots of gray, mauve and yellow, with almost no smooth rounding. The upper lip is tomato red, the lower lip a slash of peachy pink, a short strip of light green sits under it, and the chin is another slash of pink. There is barely any modeling, the gentle dark-to-light shading that makes a painted face look like a rounded solid. Instead of drawing the head and tinting it, Matisse builds the whole head out of color itself, which is exactly the thing 1905 viewers could not forgive.
4. 4
   The hat, a tower of pure color

   The top half of the canvas, above her forehead

   A wide blue brim sits straight across, and above it rise exuberant puffs of orange, green and blue swirling around one another, with a small patch of her red hair peeking out beneath. It is the most riotous passage in the picture, which is its own small joke, since the sitter, Amélie, had herself made and sold hats for a living before she married the painter.
5. 5
   The glove and the fan, society props painted wild

   Lower portion, her raised arm and the fan it holds

   She wears a long green glove speckled with pink, like a row of embroidery, and holds a fan of thick white and peach splashes flecked with violet and green. Gloves and a fan are the standard accessories of a respectable society portrait, which is exactly why painting them in clashing color was so provocative. The subject is utterly conventional. Only the paint is a riot.
6. 6
   The background that won’t sit still

   The space around and behind the figure

   The background is not a described room but broad, loose areas of clashing color, patches of green, violet and orange that refuse to recede into depth. The figure and her surroundings sit on one bright, flat, restless surface instead of in a window-like space, and bare or thinly painted canvas shows through in places, part of the unfinished look that scandalized the Salon. There is nowhere for the eye to rest.