Continuing through September 13, 2026

When Henri Matisse’s “Femme au chapeau” (Woman with a Hat) was first shown at the 1905 Paris Salon d’Automne, it inspired whispered insults and bursts of laughter. A portrait of Matisse’s devoted wife Amélie, a milliner who wears a hat of her own creation, it violated the era’s ideas about the acceptable use of color and the staid conventions of portraiture. In truth, it was only nominally a portrait, as Matisse used his wife, who posed in a black dress, as a kind of screen on which he projected his experiments with color. 

Now, 121 years later, as the centerpiece of “Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal,” this audacious exercise in chromatic chaos is again drawing crowds, but of very different kind. The painting hasn’t changed — except for some slight fading of its chrome yellow — but the context around it certainly has. In an era when kids wear neon green soccer shoes and stare at computer screens ablaze with brash RGB color, Matisse’s once-revolutionary palette is less jarring. The canvas, which its first owner, Leo Stein, called “the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen,” has evolved over time into a revered icon of modernism.

Organized by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator, and Maria Castro, former Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with assistance from Alison Guh, “Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal” attempts to recreate the painting’s original impact by re-staging its debut in Gallery VII. The centerpiece work is surrounded by notable paintings that were also in the 1905 salon, as well as carefully chosen examples by Matisse’s Fauve colleagues Charles Camoin, André Derain, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, and Maurice de Vlaminck, Matisse’s fellow “wild beasts“ of early 20th-century Paris.

The French public had certainly seen unexpected uses of color before. Gauguin’s purple palm trees and Monet’s blue shadows challenged the tradition of representational art more than just for its drawing. But the seemingly random patches of green, orange, mauve, pink, yellow and lilac that activate Matisse’s canvas struck viewers and critics as insulting to its subject’s dignity and their own sensibilities. The tropes of academic portraiture demanded that tasteful portraits of women involved demure poses, smooth skin, and idealized features. What kind of man, they wondered, would portray a woman, especially his own wife, in such a gaudy and degrading rainbow of artificially imposed hues?

Despite (or possibly because of) the outrage it generated, “Femme au chapeau” was purchased by the American collector Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude on the last day of the salon for $500 (about $20,000 in 2026 dollars). The welcome sum provided a huge boost for the cash-poor Matisse family. One of the curatorial innovations here is a comfortable seating area where digital projections of the Stein’s Paris apartment and its ever-changing roster of modern masterpieces, including “Femme au chapeau,” hover on the walls. 

In 1916 Gertrude Stein sold “Femme au chapeau” to her sister-in-law Sarah and her husband Michael, who brought it to the U.S. in July of 1935. Works from the Stein’s collection, including “Femme au chapeau,” were included in a major Matisse show that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1936, breaking museum attendance records. Matisse’s modernist Mona Lisa, an emissary of advanced French culture, gradually transformed into an inspiration for independent-minded artists. The final gallery showcases 13 works that reflect the work’s enduring influence. 

“Femme au chapeau” was hanging in the living room of the Stein’s home on Kingsley Avenue in Palo Alto in 1943 when Richard Diebenkorn, then a Stanford junior, saw it along with numerous other Matisse paintings. “Right there,” he later recounted, “I made contact with Matisse and it has just stuck with me all the way.” Diebenkorn’s 1963 “Woman in Hat and Gloves,” which appears with other selections in which the influence of “Femme au chapeau is explored, depicts his wife Phyllis in a contrasting warm and cool palette that carries echoes of Matissean color and brushwork.

In 1949, after the death of Michael Stein, “Femme au chapeau” was sold to Elise Haas, the first female president of the SFMOMA board, who hung it in her Jackson Street apartment alongside works by Picasso, Brancusi, Rivera, O’Keeffe, and others. 

In 1952, when “Femme au chapeau” was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) as part of a traveling Matisse retrospective, it was seen by David Park, who had recently returned to figuration after his early brush with Abstract Expresssionism. Matisse had a definite impact on Park. His “Mother-in-Law” (1955), an affectionate caricature, depicts an elderly woman whose jaunty yellow hat, pink lipstick, and cadmium red jawline show how looking at Matisse had loosened up Park’s color. 

It is tempting to refer to “Femme au chapeau: a Modern Scandal” as a blockbuster exhibition, but it is more than that: it is a context-palooza. Supported by a treasure trove of ephemera — catalogs, photos, correspondence, and more — it reveals not just the influence that a single painting can generate, but also the historical and cultural shifts it can reveal. By taking us back to when “Femme au chapeau” once drew outrage, the exhibition raises striking questions about why we experience it so differently in the present. Do we appreciate art as much as the citizens of Paris did in 1905? Outrage is, after all, a form of caring. Indifference, something much more dangerous, is what this exhibition guards us against.