“A certain figure of a woman in green, green-cheeked, the greenest attack upon taste and common sense I’ve ever witnessed,” a critic wrote of Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat) following its debut at 1905’s Salon d’Automne in Paris.
That green!
Seafoam.
High key.
Inspired, perhaps, by the extended time Matisse had been spending painting at Collioure on the French Mediterranean near the border with Spain.
That green.
“The nastiest smear of paint he had ever seen.”
So said Leo Stein, Gertrude Stein’s brother.
Nasty, perhaps, at first blush to 1905 eyes. But equally compelling. Ultimately irresistible to the influential expatriate collector.
“He said at one point that he would have snatched it up at once if he hadn’t first had to get over the nastiness of the putting on of the paint,” Janet Bishop, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, told me via video interview. “He didn’t even really like it, but in it he could recognize something potent and powerful and new. Artists are always challenging us and taking us into new territory and that piece feels emblematic of a moment where Matisse took us into new territory.”
One small painting for Matisse, one giant leap for Modern art–or something like that.
“His friends discouraged him from showing it in the salon; it was a last-minute submission,” Bishop explained. “It was the last piece that he created back in Paris after spending the summer in Collioure. His friends thought he was putting his reputation at risk by submitting that piece for public display, but he was absolutely emboldened by it.”
Matisse’s green portrait of his wife, Amélie, a hatmaker, takes center stage during “Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal,” a major exhibition illuminating how the painting—now an icon of SFMOMA’s collection—made its mark on art history.
“It’s one thing to take that kind of liberty with color with a landscape or a still life, but to do so with a portrait of a woman was radical,” Bishop said. “There’s several things about that painting that are radical. One is his use of the palette–green for her face–it has this very patchy, abstract background, and then that she’s looking right out at us. She is not sitting demurely reading a book or working on her sewing. The way that she gazes out at the viewer, her eyes follow you wherever you go. She is almost confrontational.”
The painting, and others alongside it at the Salon by André Derain–Matisse’s Collioure painting partner–and Maurice de Vlaminck, birthed the “Fauvist” label–”wild beasts”–from another critic, so named for their outrageous, unreal, novel color choices. Femme au chapeau hung at the center of a defining moment of rupture in the history of modern art, shocking audiences with its seemingly carefree brushstrokes and bright hues purposefully departing from observed reality.
It is arguably SFMOMA’s most art-historically significant work.
Femme au chapeau Comes To San Francisco
Henri Matisse, ‘Open Window, Collioure,’ 1905; National Gallery of Art, collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney.
© 2026 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Following its purchase by Leo Stein from the Salon in 1905, the painting went to the Stein’s Paris apartment, site of writer Gertrude’s famed artist gatherings. The exhibition catalogue shares a phenomenal picture of the Femme au chapeau hanging beneath Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein completed in 1906, two of the 20th century’s most iconic paintings.
In 1915, Femme au chapeau made its way to the Paris collection of their brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Sarah Stein, who brought it from France to the Bay Area in 1935. The San Francisco Museum of Art, now SFMOMA, opened that same year. Matisse’s painting was shown in the United States for the first time in 1936 during an exhibition at the museum organized by its founding director, Grace McCann Morley. Femme au Chapeau graced the cover of the brochure.
Levi’s heiress Elise S. Haas purchased the work from Sarah Stein in 1948.
“We found this letter where (Matisse) wrote to Sarah Stein once she had the piece back in Palo Alto and he wanted to borrow it for an exhibition in Paris,” Bishop said. “She declined. He asked for Femme au chapeau because he considered it one of his principal works. That was decades after he made it. It was a piece that meant a lot to him.”
Haas, thankfully, wasn’t so possessive of the masterpiece as Sarah Stein and bequeathed the painting to SFMOMA in 1991. It stays on nearly continuous public view, but under the terms of its bequest, Femme au chapeau does not travel, making SFMOMA the exclusive venue for this landmark exhibition, and the only place you’ll ever see the artwork.
Hat Tub Time Machine
Maurice d e Vlaminck, ‘Woman with a Hat, 1906; National Gallery of Art, donated by Lolo Sarnoff in memory of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert von Hirsch
© 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
A herculean feat of art historical research and sweet-talking by Bishop and co-curator Maria Castro has recreated the 1905 Salon d’Automne at SFMOMA. They have reunited the greatest number of objects from the gallery Femme au chapeau hung in since 1905. Loans come from the greatest art museums in the U.S. and Europe along with those from private collections. Visitors travel back 121 years to the day Leo Stein bought Woman with a Hat off the wall.
Copies of the Salon catalogue detailing each artwork in the exhibition–roughly 1200–are available. Where the exact painting couldn’t be identified by catalogue description, curators secured one by the same artist representative of what would have been seen. Designed to echo the architectural context of the Salon, the gallery features work by all 10 of the artists included in the original presentation.
“I was expecting the whole gallery to feel Fauvist, but you really see how Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck stand out as being the ones at the forefront of this new form of expression, and also how few figurative works there were,” Bishop said.
Animated large-scale projections of both the Grand Palais where the Salon was staged and Leo and Gertrude Stein’s Left Bank apartment provide further connections between visitors and the early 20th Parisian avant-garde.
The final chapters of the exhibition trace how artists have responded to Matisse’s painting over time, including a delightful sampling of other “women wearing hats” paintings.
“Out of more than 1000 paintings, it is the one that made the biggest splash,” Bishop said. “The permission that he gave other artists to work with a non-objective palette, to visibly depart from objective reality, and to relish the pleasure of brush work and these color choices that clearly gave Matisse a lot of pleasure to work.”
More From Forbes
FORBES | By Chadd Scott
Traveling To San Francisco For Art On A Budget
FORBES | By Chadd Scott
All That Jazz—And Art
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
