BEAUTY
Woman With a Hat by Henri Matisse Beauty and the Wild Beasts Lauren Tracy, BA
T
he Fauvist movement was flung into cultural cognizance in 1905 when Henri Matisse’s Woman With a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California), among various other works by Matisse, Rousseau, and Derain, were displayed for the first time in the Sa-
lon d’Automne exhibition in Paris, France, alongside a Renaissance-era sculpture by Donatello. Abraded by the exuberant use of color and untamed brush-stroked abstraction, art critic Louis Vauxcelles derided this new style of art as “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” (“Donatello among the wild
Woman With a Hat by Henri Matisse (1905). Oil on canvas. 31 × 24 cm. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, New York. Reproduction, including downloading of Matisse works, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. jamafacialplasticsurgery.com
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery March/April 2014 Volume 16, Number 2
Copyright 2014 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Downloaded From: http://archfaci.jamanetwork.com/ by a UQ Library User on 06/19/2015
81
Beauty
beasts”).1 Les Fauves, or Fauvists as they came to be known, were a group of artists who began to rebel against the Impressionism movement popular at the time. Unlike the Impressionists, who used delicate brush work and lifelike portrayal of light to paint accurate and natural-appearing scenes of everyday life, the Fauvists strove to emphasize an abstraction of ordinary life using exuberant, unnatural colors and freeroaming brushstrokes. His debut in the Salon d’Automne was just the beginning of Matisse’s notably long-lasting and plastic art career, which spanned over a half a century. Matisse was born in 1869 into the prosperous family of a grain merchant in northern France. In his teens he moved to Paris to study law, until an attack of what he later referenced as appendicitis forced him to return to his hometown to recuperate. From his hospital bed, Matisse noticed a fellow patient painting a Swiss landscape with vivid oil colors and “seeing that I was becoming a burden to myself during my convalescence [I thought] to try the same distraction… my mother took it upon herself to buy me a paint-box.”2 Much to the disappointment of his sometimes overbearing father, Matisse’s attraction to art intensified, and in 1891 he returned to Paris not to resume the study of law but to begin art tutelage at the Académie Julian. Matisse’s early works focused on popular traditional landscapes and conservative still lifes. A revitalized interest in color theory followed the mid–19th century translation of Goethe’s publication, Theory of Colors (1810), into various languages, and Matisse began to explore the juxtaposition of contrasting colors as well as the human emotional response evoked by the use of competing colors. He explained that “color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty,” and that “color [can be used] as a means of expressing emotion and not as a transcription of nature.”3 The view that art should evoke a comprehensive emotional response, rather than strictly depict realism, guided Matisse’s work in the early 20th century and would spark the colorful and controversial movement that would become known as Fauvism. In 1906 Matisse painted “Woman With a Hat” with his wife modeling the long gloves, fan, and fanciful hat worn by the women of the French bourgeoisie. The painting reveals visible coarse brush work and vibrantly unnatural colors. Surprising deep acid green shadowing on the woman’s nose, upper lip, and forehead frame the figure’s face and glow vibrantly in sharp contrast to the woman’s expression of bored ennui. The bright expressivity, bizarrely unreal colors, and unfinished appearance of this painting were shocking to critics at the time, who aside from referring to the piece with the beastly term “le fauve,” disparaged the work as “a pot of paint [that] has been flung in the face of the public.”1 At this point Matisse was in his second committed relationship, with 3 children, and was struggling financially. He took this criticism personally but stated that “the personality of the artist develops and asserts
82
itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities.”1 Amid the stings of critics, Matisse found his first enduring financial supporter in the cultural and literary figure Gertrude Stein, who purchased Woman With a Hat” for 500 francs, or the equivalent of about $100.4 This encounter proved pivotal for both the purchaser and the painter. After hanging the recently purchased “Woman With a Hat” in her Parisian apartment, Stein was visited by many curious local artists, thus establishing her reputation as an insightful and well-connected collector of the avant-garde arts. Matisse likewise benefited from the financial support and legitimizing effects of this purchase; he was soon recognized as the leader of the Fauvist movement and the abrupt departure into artistic representational abstraction that the movement represented. As Impressionism gave way to Cubism and Expressionism, the Fauvist movement ultimately was a short-lived transitory state, lasting from roughly 1904 to 1908. Despite its brief duration, Fauvism was crucial to the development of artistic movements that followed. The works of Matisse, as exemplified by “Woman with a Hat,” were among the first to step outside the daintily accurate confines of Impressionism. With fantastical, boisterous colors and raw use of the paintbrush, Matisse pushed art beyond what was comfortable at the time. In his art, Matisse emphasized the depiction of idea and feeling rather than the representation of reality, and his works served as an important shift toward the highly abstract artistic movements looming on the horizon. Matisse thought that the goal of the artistic process was “that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture” and believed that beauty can be experienced through the intangible physiologic response to form and color. This belief, that beauty was a cohesive state experienced by the viewer rather than a subscription to rules of forms and figure, was monumental in shaping the course of the highly abstract modern art that characterized the 20th century. 1. Chilvers I. Fauvism: The Oxford Dictionary of Art. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2004:250. 2. Spurling H. The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2001:43-45. 3. Matisse H. Matisse on Art. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1995:322. 4. Lubow A. An eye for genius: the collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein. Smithsonian website: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture /An-Eye-for-Genius-The-Collections-of-Gertrude-and-Leo-Stein.html. Accessed June 19, 2013.
Author Affiliation: Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery Institute, University of California–Irvine, Orange. Corresponding Author: Lauren Tracy, BA, Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery Institute, University of California, Irvine, 101 The City Dr, Orange, CA 92868 ([email protected]). Section Editor: Norman J. Pastorek, MD. Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery March/April 2014 Volume 16, Number 2
Copyright 2014 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Downloaded From: http://archfaci.jamanetwork.com/ by a UQ Library User on 06/19/2015
jamafacialplasticsurgery.com
Woman With a Hat by Henri Matisse Beauty and the Wild Beasts Lauren Tracy, BA
T
he Fauvist movement was flung into cultural cognizance in 1905 when Henri Matisse’s Woman With a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California), among various other works by Matisse, Rousseau, and Derain, were displayed for the first time in the Sa-
lon d’Automne exhibition in Paris, France, alongside a Renaissance-era sculpture by Donatello. Abraded by the exuberant use of color and untamed brush-stroked abstraction, art critic Louis Vauxcelles derided this new style of art as “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” (“Donatello among the wild
Woman With a Hat by Henri Matisse (1905). Oil on canvas. 31 × 24 cm. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, New York. Reproduction, including downloading of Matisse works, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. jamafacialplasticsurgery.com
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery March/April 2014 Volume 16, Number 2
Copyright 2014 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Downloaded From: http://archfaci.jamanetwork.com/ by a UQ Library User on 06/19/2015
81
Beauty
beasts”).1 Les Fauves, or Fauvists as they came to be known, were a group of artists who began to rebel against the Impressionism movement popular at the time. Unlike the Impressionists, who used delicate brush work and lifelike portrayal of light to paint accurate and natural-appearing scenes of everyday life, the Fauvists strove to emphasize an abstraction of ordinary life using exuberant, unnatural colors and freeroaming brushstrokes. His debut in the Salon d’Automne was just the beginning of Matisse’s notably long-lasting and plastic art career, which spanned over a half a century. Matisse was born in 1869 into the prosperous family of a grain merchant in northern France. In his teens he moved to Paris to study law, until an attack of what he later referenced as appendicitis forced him to return to his hometown to recuperate. From his hospital bed, Matisse noticed a fellow patient painting a Swiss landscape with vivid oil colors and “seeing that I was becoming a burden to myself during my convalescence [I thought] to try the same distraction… my mother took it upon herself to buy me a paint-box.”2 Much to the disappointment of his sometimes overbearing father, Matisse’s attraction to art intensified, and in 1891 he returned to Paris not to resume the study of law but to begin art tutelage at the Académie Julian. Matisse’s early works focused on popular traditional landscapes and conservative still lifes. A revitalized interest in color theory followed the mid–19th century translation of Goethe’s publication, Theory of Colors (1810), into various languages, and Matisse began to explore the juxtaposition of contrasting colors as well as the human emotional response evoked by the use of competing colors. He explained that “color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty,” and that “color [can be used] as a means of expressing emotion and not as a transcription of nature.”3 The view that art should evoke a comprehensive emotional response, rather than strictly depict realism, guided Matisse’s work in the early 20th century and would spark the colorful and controversial movement that would become known as Fauvism. In 1906 Matisse painted “Woman With a Hat” with his wife modeling the long gloves, fan, and fanciful hat worn by the women of the French bourgeoisie. The painting reveals visible coarse brush work and vibrantly unnatural colors. Surprising deep acid green shadowing on the woman’s nose, upper lip, and forehead frame the figure’s face and glow vibrantly in sharp contrast to the woman’s expression of bored ennui. The bright expressivity, bizarrely unreal colors, and unfinished appearance of this painting were shocking to critics at the time, who aside from referring to the piece with the beastly term “le fauve,” disparaged the work as “a pot of paint [that] has been flung in the face of the public.”1 At this point Matisse was in his second committed relationship, with 3 children, and was struggling financially. He took this criticism personally but stated that “the personality of the artist develops and asserts
82
itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities.”1 Amid the stings of critics, Matisse found his first enduring financial supporter in the cultural and literary figure Gertrude Stein, who purchased Woman With a Hat” for 500 francs, or the equivalent of about $100.4 This encounter proved pivotal for both the purchaser and the painter. After hanging the recently purchased “Woman With a Hat” in her Parisian apartment, Stein was visited by many curious local artists, thus establishing her reputation as an insightful and well-connected collector of the avant-garde arts. Matisse likewise benefited from the financial support and legitimizing effects of this purchase; he was soon recognized as the leader of the Fauvist movement and the abrupt departure into artistic representational abstraction that the movement represented. As Impressionism gave way to Cubism and Expressionism, the Fauvist movement ultimately was a short-lived transitory state, lasting from roughly 1904 to 1908. Despite its brief duration, Fauvism was crucial to the development of artistic movements that followed. The works of Matisse, as exemplified by “Woman with a Hat,” were among the first to step outside the daintily accurate confines of Impressionism. With fantastical, boisterous colors and raw use of the paintbrush, Matisse pushed art beyond what was comfortable at the time. In his art, Matisse emphasized the depiction of idea and feeling rather than the representation of reality, and his works served as an important shift toward the highly abstract artistic movements looming on the horizon. Matisse thought that the goal of the artistic process was “that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture” and believed that beauty can be experienced through the intangible physiologic response to form and color. This belief, that beauty was a cohesive state experienced by the viewer rather than a subscription to rules of forms and figure, was monumental in shaping the course of the highly abstract modern art that characterized the 20th century. 1. Chilvers I. Fauvism: The Oxford Dictionary of Art. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2004:250. 2. Spurling H. The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2001:43-45. 3. Matisse H. Matisse on Art. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1995:322. 4. Lubow A. An eye for genius: the collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein. Smithsonian website: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture /An-Eye-for-Genius-The-Collections-of-Gertrude-and-Leo-Stein.html. Accessed June 19, 2013.
Author Affiliation: Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery Institute, University of California–Irvine, Orange. Corresponding Author: Lauren Tracy, BA, Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery Institute, University of California, Irvine, 101 The City Dr, Orange, CA 92868 ([email protected]). Section Editor: Norman J. Pastorek, MD. Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery March/April 2014 Volume 16, Number 2
Copyright 2014 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
Downloaded From: http://archfaci.jamanetwork.com/ by a UQ Library User on 06/19/2015
jamafacialplasticsurgery.com
