A perfectly ordinary portrait, on fire
Step back and take in the picture whole before you walk into its details, because the first thing to understand is how conventional the bones of it are. This is a half-length portrait of a fashionable well-to-do woman (the kind a French writer of the day would have called bourgeois, meaning prosperous and respectable middle-class), turned slightly, looking out at you. She wears a long glove. She holds a fan in her raised hand. On her head sits an enormous flowered hat. Every one of those things, the pose, the glove, the fan, the hat, is the standard furniture of a respectable society portrait, the kind a banker might commission of his wife. If you described the picture over the telephone, element by element, it would sound completely unremarkable. That ordinariness is the trap. The whole bomb of the picture is the gap between what is depicted (a perfectly conventional lady) and how it is painted (in colors from another planet). Hold both halves in your head at once, because the friction between them is the entire point.
Now walk into the face, where the worst of the offense lives. Start at the nose. A long green streak runs straight down the bridge of it, finishing in a little blot of pale yellow at the tip. A nose is not green. Matisse painted this one green anyway. (A caution here, because this is the single most-confused fact about the painting: that nose streak is not the famous full vertical green stripe that splits a whole face into a warm half and a cool half. That stripe is in a different Matisse portrait of the same wife from the same year, called The Green Stripe, which lives in Copenhagen. People merge the two into one painting constantly. They are siblings, not twins. Woman with a Hat has a green streak down the nose and a green smear on the forehead, not the face-bisecting stripe.) Move up to the forehead and you find that smear, a horizontal swipe of green just under the hat brim. It is almost certainly meant to be the shadow the wide brim throws across her brow, except a shadow should be a darker, cooler flesh tone, and Matisse made it frank green. Color is doing the work of shadow while flatly refusing to behave like shadow.
Read the rest of the face the same way and it falls apart into pure color. The cheeks and chin are assembled from streaks of green and blots of gray, mauve and yellow. The upper lip is tomato red; the lower lip is a slash of peachy pink with a short strip of light green tucked under it; the chin is another slash of pink. And you can see the speed of it in the paint: the strokes are dragged on thick and wet and left there, not blended away, so a cheek is a few swipes of color sitting side by side rather than a smooth modeled surface. There is almost no gentle dark-to-light shading to round the face into a solid head. It reads instead as a patchwork of flat patches, a face built like a mosaic out of colors no face has ever had. This is what made 1905 viewers feel slightly ill. We are wired to read a human face very precisely, and Matisse fed our face-reading machinery a set of wrong signals on purpose. And yet, for all the violence of the color, the face itself is composed, almost serene: she looks steadily out, mouth set, as if entirely unbothered that she has been painted in green.
Lift your eye to the hat, which takes up the entire top of the canvas and is the most riotous passage in the picture. A wide blue brim sits straight across her brow, and above it rises a great mass of orange, green and blue puffs, swirling around one another like blown smoke, with a small patch of her red hair showing beneath. It is a tower of pure color stacked on her head. And it is, again, that small earned joke: the most extravagant hat in modern painting, sitting on the head of a woman who once made hats for a living.
Drop back down to her hands and the props of respectability. She wears a long green glove speckled with pink, the pink flecks reading almost like embroidery, and her gloved hand holds a fan, painted as thick splashes of white and peach flecked with violet and green. A glove and a fan are exactly what a proper society sitter holds. Painting them in this clashing color is what turned a conventional commission into a provocation. The accessories say “respectable lady.” The paint says something else entirely.
Finally, notice that there is nowhere for your eye to rest. The background is not a room. It is broad, loose areas of clashing color, patches of green and violet and orange that refuse to settle into the back of a space the way a painted wall normally would. The figure and her surroundings sit together on one bright, flat, restless surface, and in places you can see bare or thinly painted canvas showing through, part of the unfinished look that horrified the Salon. The usual deal a portrait offers (here is a person, standing in a believable space, lit by believable light) has been quietly torn up. And here is the move that makes the picture matter, the thing worth fixing in your mind before you leave it: color is now carrying the structure. It builds the head, it stands in for the shadow and the light, it does the job that for four centuries belonged to drawing and tonal modeling. What is left is a flat field of pure color with the shape of a fashionable woman pressed into it. That, in 1905, was the most radical thing in Paris.