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A critic wrote that this painting of Henri Matisse's wife Amelie was like "a pot of paint flung in the face of the public."
And as if that wasn't rude enough, he threw salt in the wound saying that Matisse and his buddies were a bunch of talentless hacks! No better than "wild beasts" (or fauves in French.) Both the comments and the painting caught people’s attention, and before you could say "sacre bleu!" Matisse became the head of the Fauvist painting movement, named after his "wild and beastly" paintings.
In a further stroke of luck, Gertrude and Leo Stein noticed that Matisse’s morale was low due to the poor reception of his work, and they decided to help out by buying some of his paintings. Gertrude Stein was played by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s 2011 film “Midnight in Paris.” In reality, Leo didn't actually care for the work, and was quoted as saying that the painting was "the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen." Harsh.
When asked what his wife was wearing when he painted this work, Matisse said, "black". Quite an imagination on that guy. Do you think he dreamt up that fabulous hat, too? The colorful work is one of the most popular paintings currently living in the SFMOMA collection.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Woman with a Hat
Woman with a Hat (French: La femme au chapeau) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Henri Matisse. It depicts Matisse's wife, Amélie Matisse. It was painted in 1905 and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne during the autumn of the same year, along with works by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and several other artists later known as "Fauves".
Critic Louis Vauxcelles, in comparing the paintings of Matisse and his associates with a Renaissance-type sculpture displayed along side them, used the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves..." (Donatello among the wild beasts). Woman with a Hat was at the center of this controversy, marking a stylistic shift in the work of Matisse from the Divisionist brushstrokes of his earlier work to a more expressive style. Its loose brushwork and "unfinished" quality shocked viewers as much as its vivid, non-naturalistic colors.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Woman with a Hat
I like this painting because it has a lot of colors. There are a lot of pieces to this painting that can be looked at.