Woman with a Hat

Matisse's wife sits in a feathered hat, but her face, dress, and background blaze with wild, arbitrary, clashing color - green and mauve streaking her cheeks, the brushwork loose and unruly. Shown at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, the picture so shocked viewers that a critic dubbed Matisse and his friends 'fauves,' wild beasts, naming the movement. Now in San Francisco, Woman with a Hat is the founding scandal of Fauvism - color freed entirely from description, used for its own expressive power, a deliberate, exhilarating assault on every rule of how a portrait should look.