The nastiest smear of paint they had ever seen
Into this hostile room walked the people who would change everything for the painting and for Matisse: the Stein family, American expatriates living in Paris, about to become the avant-garde’s first great patrons. The 1905 purchase is recorded as the work of the siblings Leo and Gertrude Stein. Leo (1872–1947) was the connoisseur, the one with the eye and the opinions, and he did the haggling; Gertrude (1874–1946) was the writer, whose memoir would later become one of the famous accounts of these years. But the Stein who would prove the most devoted and durable champion Matisse ever had was Leo’s sister-in-law, Sarah Stein, the wife of his brother Michael, and she is the reason the painting (and Matisse himself) eventually reached America at all. When the family first saw Woman with a Hat hanging in the cage of wild beasts, Leo’s reaction was not love. By his own description it was a thing “brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.”
That is the detail worth dwelling on, because it is the whole story in miniature. The Steins did not buy the picture in a flash of taste. They recoiled from it first, then could not stop coming back. By the accounts that survive they returned to the Salon again and again over something like five weeks, standing in front of the thing they had called the nastiest paint they had ever seen, until the recoil curdled into conviction and they bought it. They bought it straight off the Salon wall, the first major modern picture the family ever owned and the cornerstone of what became one of the most important private collections of modern art in the world.
What they paid is genuinely unsettled. The headline figure is around 500 francs (roughly $100 at the time). But the accounts diverge. In her own memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude wrote that the picture was listed at 500 and that Matisse accepted their offer of 400. The Matisse family told it the other way around: that the Steins offered 300 and Matisse held out for the full 500. Each party, you will notice, remembered the haggle in the way that flattered them. So the truthful thing to say is that it sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 francs, and that the exact number depends on whose memory you trust.
Whatever the figure, the sale put money in the pocket of a demoralized painter at the lowest moment of his career, and it launched the Steins as collectors. And here is what that launch actually meant. The Steins ran two famous Saturday-evening open houses (Leo and Gertrude on the rue de Fleurus, Michael and Sarah on the rue Madame), and those crowded rooms became the place where a whole generation first saw Matisse and Picasso on the wall, years before any museum would touch either man. Woman with a Hat was the founding purchase of that collection. A single small portrait, jeered at by the public and called nasty by its own buyer, turned out to be the first stone of the room where the future of painting got introduced to itself.
From there the painting traveled, and the journey is its own quiet story. Around 1913 or 1914 Leo and Gertrude divided their holdings (Leo took the older pictures, Gertrude kept the Picassos), and Woman with a Hat passed to Michael and Sarah Stein, the family’s fiercest believer in Matisse. Sarah was no passive heir: she had persuaded Matisse to open his own painting school in 1908 and kept the best surviving record of his teaching, and it was Sarah and Michael who, in 1935, carried the painting across the Atlantic to the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1948 it was bought from Sarah Stein, along with several other Matisses, by Elise S. Haas, a San Francisco–born collector who happened to be a grandniece of Levi Strauss, the blue-jeans manufacturer, and her husband Walter. And on Elise Haas’s death the painting came at last to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as her 1991 bequest (a bequest is a gift made through a will), accession number 91.161, where it hangs on permanent view.
It is a strange arc to sit with. The picture that respectable Paris called crude and mad, that its own buyer first called the nastiest smear of paint he had ever seen, is now read as one of the founding documents of modern art, the canvas where color took over the structural job that drawing had always done. After Matisse, a face could be built out of green and a shadow could be any color the picture wanted, and no one had to apologize for it. The German Expressionists of the next decade (the Brücke and Blaue Reiter painters in Dresden and Munich), and more broadly almost every later painter who used color to mean something instead of to copy something, were building on the door this picture kicked open. Not bad for a hasty portrait of a former hat-maker, painted to make a sale.