On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Postscript: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #5

This is the fifth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008). It’s a description of Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905):

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

This is Clark musing out loud. He lets us in on his thoughts as his omnivorous eyes scan the painting, absorbing its details. The passage exemplifies a key aspect of his approach – his use of questions. He proceeds interrogatively – nine questions in this one paragraph alone:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing?

What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder?

How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it?

Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper?

How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms?

It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves.

What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?

Or is it a great limp flower?

In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” The seventh question is my favorite: “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful. 

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905).

May 16, 2022 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl makes beautiful sentences. No painter inspires him more than Henri Matisse. In his “Going Flat Out,” in this week’s issue, a review of MoMA’s “Matisse: The Red Studio,” he says of Matisse’s “Bathers” (1907),

Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh.

That “as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery” is superb!

“Going Flat Out” is Schjeldahl’s fifth New Yorker piece on Matisse. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August 29, 2005), “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010), and “Shapes of Things” (October 20, 2014).  Matisse is one of his touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s “The Piano Lesson” “my favorite work of twentieth-century art.” Here’s his description of it:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” 

How I love that “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow”! The reference to “Psycho” makes me smile every time I read it. 

Notes on Peter Schjeldahl's "Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light"

1. I'm a big fan of Peter Schjeldahl's writing. Reading his new book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, is pure nirvana. Among its many pleasures: forty-five of the best New Yorker pieces he’s written since the publication of his last collection – the superb Let’s See; twenty-nine Village Voice pieces – all new to me; twenty 7 Days pieces, including his great “A Van Gogh Portrait” (originally titled “Portrait of Joseph Roulin”); two wonderful artist profiles (“Laura Owens” and “Rachel Harrison”); and his excellent “The Ghent Alterpiece” on the conservation of a fifteenth-century masterpiece. 

2. Of the forty-five New Yorker pieces, I think my favorites are “Zubaron’s Citrons” (originally titled “Bearing Fruit”), “Henri Matisse II” (originally titled “The Road to Nice”), and “The Ghent Alterpiece” (originally titled “The Flip Side”). All three of these pieces contain bravura descriptions of specific artworks. For example, here’s Schjeldahl’s description of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” [“Henri Matisse II”]

That “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow” is ravishing. I relish the way the passage moves from description to commentary (“The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch”). The surprising mention of Psycho at the end makes me smile every time I read it.

Henri Matisse, "The Piano Lesson" (1916)

3. The Village Voice pieces brim with piquant observations. For example: “De Kooning’s keynote is a self-engulfment in painting that demands every resource of wit and skill not to become a mess” (“Willem de Kooning”); “Scanning the details is like being knocked down and getting back up to be knocked down again” (“Picasso and the Weeping Women”); “I left the show with smells of makeup, sweat, and alcohol in my mind’s nostrils and a conviction that Toulouse-Lautrec is now the most living of fin de siècle Frenchmen” (“Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec”); “He activates the occult handshake of aesthetics and sex” (Henri Matisse – I”). Some of the comments are quite funny (e.g., on Lucian Freud: “To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included”). But if you relish descriptive analysis of specific artworks, as I do, you may find the Village Voice essays somewhat less satisfying than the New Yorker pieces. For instance, compare Schjeldahl’s Village Voice “Caspar David Friedrich” with his New Yorker “Caspar David Friedrich.” In the Village Voice piece, he says,

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints on a tonal composition combust as distinctly as scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.

That is very beautiful. But in Schjeldahl’s artful hands, it’s just the beginning. Look at what he does with it, ten years later, in The New Yorker:

The pictures don’t give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich’s use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum darks and citron lights. One doesn’t so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine. Friedrich is an artist of dusky fire, of twilight that sears. It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.

That is mind-blowingly gorgeous!

4. “A Van Gogh Portrait” is unquestionably one of Schjeldahl’s greatest hits. I first read it in his slim 1990 collection The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990. Now, twenty-nine years later, it reappears, subtly revised, in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. It’s interesting to note the changes. Here’s the brilliant opening paragraph of the 7 Days version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and perhaps intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened – they stare without focusing – and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius, or something. Maybe just by the craft of painting. Decide for yourself when you make the welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and a bit intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened. They stare without focusing. The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting. Decide when you make your welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889) by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

“Perhaps intimidating,” in the first line, has been changed to “a bit intimidating.” The second line has been reconstructed: the dashes have been converted to periods; the phrase “and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other” is now a separate sentence (“The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another”). “Unified by genius, or something” and the next sentence (“Maybe by the craft of painting”) have been combined and revised: “It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting.” “For yourself,” in the next sentence, has been deleted; “the” is changed to “your.” 

The paragraph is now more concise. Concision is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. His wonderful description of the Portrait of Joesph Roulin has also been made more concise. Here’s the 7 Days version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the sympathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green (the background). Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall design is about as hyperactive as relative symmetry can get. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medievalish green and red hatchings.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese-inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the empathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green in the background. Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall composition is as hyperactive as relative symmetry can be. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medieval-ish green and red hatchings. 

“Sympathy” has been changed to “empathy.” The brackets around “the background” have been dropped. “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping” has been trimmed to “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping.” “The overall design is about” is now “The overall composition is.” “Can get” is now “can be.” These are all subtle improvements, illuminating Schjeldahl’s approach to style.

Vincent van Gogh, "Portrait of Joseph Roulin" (1889)

My favourite part of “A Van Gogh Portrait” is the baseball figuration at the end. Here’s the 7 Days version:

So make your first visit to Roulin count. Then observe the work’s action on its peers. The pictures in the same room by Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau may seem as elated as the teammates of a slugger who, having hit a home run, returns to their midst, with high fives all around.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Make your initial visit to Roulin count. Then observe the effect on its peers. Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau flock like teammates of a slugger who, having homered, returns to their midst with high fives all around.

“So” and “the pictures in the same room” have been deleted. "Effect" has been substituted for "work's action." “May seem as elated” has been changed to “flock like”; “hit a home run” shortened to “homered.” An inspired image has been sharpened.

October 20, 2014 Issue

If you admire Peter Schjeldahl’s style, as I do, you’ll relish his “Shapes of Things” in this week’s issue. It’s his fourth essay on Matisse since he joined The New Yorker. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August 29, 2005), and “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010). Matisse is one of Schjeldahl’s touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s The Piano Lesson “my favorite work of twentieth-century art.” It’s fun to read Schjeldahl’s Matisse quartet and cherry-pick the best lines. In “Twin Peaks,” he says Matisse’s contours “are like the borders of wetness left by waves on the beach.” In “Art as Life,” he defines Fauvism as “a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.” In “The Road to Nice,” he notes “the black-contoured, zero-gravity, incredibly sumptuous ciphers of fruit” in Bowl of Apples on a Table and says, “Even close to a century after the fact, an ancestral voice in my head shrills, ‘You can’t do that in a painting!’ (But, guess what?).” That parenthesis is pure Schjeldahl. And in this week’s “Shapes of Things,” he says, “When Matisse is at his best, the exquisite friction of his color, his line, and his pictorial invention – licks of a cat’s tongue – overwhelm perception, at which point enjoyment sputters into awe.” Licks of a cats tongue – you can’t say that in criticism. (But, guess what?) Of the four pieces, my favorite is “The Road to Nice,” in which Schjeldahl audaciously compares Matisse’s The Piano Lesson to Hitchcock’s Psycho: “Like Psycho, The Piano Lesson unfolds the secret of its coherence by seemingly precipitous but precisely calibrated jumps and starts.” And the final paragraph, in which Schjeldahl says, “I’m just in a mood – enhanced, now, by the thought of the inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint that slashes Matisse’s Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) from chin to left thigh – to insist on a hierarchy of sensations that favor the experience of being tripped cleanly out of ourselves and into wondering glee,” is elating. That “inexplicable, inchoately thrilling arc of black paint” is inspired. The whole sensuous, eloquent piece is inspired! It’s Matissean.