The rebel autumn show

In the autumn of 1905, Henri Matisse was thirty-five years old, broke, the father of three, and not remotely famous. He had been at painting for more than a decade with very little to show for it. He had spent 1904 trying on the dotted technique of the painter Paul Signac, covering a canvas in tiny separate touches of pure color, then spent the summer of 1905 in the small Mediterranean port of Collioure(pronounced “koll-YOOR”), near the Spanish border, pushing color further off the leash than he or anyone else had dared. He came back to Paris with a head full of impossible color and an empty bank account. He needed, very badly, to sell something.

The place to do it was the Salon. You should know what that word meant, because in France a painter’s whole career ran through it. A Salon was the big public exhibition where paintings were hung for the city to come and judge, and being accepted into one (or rejected from it) could make or break you. For most of the nineteenth century there was one that mattered, the official state Salon, run by a conservative jury that liked its paintings smooth, finished, and well-behaved. By 1905 a rebel alternative had appeared. The Salon d’Automne(pronounced “sa-LOHN doh-TUN,” French for “the Autumn Salon”) had been founded just two years earlier, in 1903, as a show by and for the painters the official Salon would never let in. It was juried, but the jury was sympathetic. It was independent. And it was held in the grandest room in Paris.

That room was the Grand Palais, the enormous glass-and-iron exhibition hall built for the 1900 World’s Fair, just off the Champs-Élysées. The 1905 edition of the Salon d’Automne ran there from October into late November. This is where a painter who had no patron, no reputation, and no money could still, in theory, hang a picture on a wall where the whole art world would walk past it. Matisse decided to hang a portrait of his wife.

It was not, by all accounts, an easy decision, and not everyone thought he should. According to the museum that owns the painting today, colleagues and even the Salon’s own organizers urged Matisse not to show it, by one account “for fear that he would really embarrass himself.” (You will sometimes read a juicier version, that the President of France refused to inaugurate the show because of pictures like this one. That story floats around but does not rest on solid ground, so set it aside. The documented version is quieter and more telling: the people who knew him best looked at the picture and winced.) He showed it anyway. He had a sale to make, and nothing left to lose.