“Step into the salon,” said Janet Bishop, chief curator of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art to the crowd of 60-plus gathered for the press preview of “Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal.” Here “the salon” meant the re-creation of the Salon d’automne in Paris, where Henri Matisse’s groundbreaking, colorful painting was first exhibited in 1905.
Graceful ferns arch from pots standing in corners; the walls are lined with maroon wallpaper festooned with gold laurel wreaths inspired by the 1904 Salon d’automne (not a single photograph survives of the 1905 reprise).
Wainscotting trims the walls and paintings hang side by side, where “Femme au chapeau” (1905) is reunited with three other Matisse paintings it would have been beside in its grand debut at the Grand Palais. The tinkling piano music of Erik Satie drifts in to complete the mood. In short: It’s a vibe.
The celebrity canvas occupies a starring role, prominently lit and visible from an adjacent gallery through a cutout in the wall. The subject of the painting, Matisse’s wife Amélie Matisse, knew a thing or two about hats. Herself a milliner, she is wearing a hat of her own design. Turn of the century Paris was full of people plying her profession — some 1,000 milliners were employed in the city’s peak hat days.
The museum has owned the painting since Elise Haas’s bequest in 1991 — it’s usually on display on the second floor — but it has moved to the fourth floor to become, for the first time, the centerpiece of an entire exhibition devoted to its context.
Of the roughly 30 works in the Haas bequest, Matisse’s masterwork is the only one that can’t travel (it must also always be on display as a stipulation of the bequest). Haas likened what was certainly one of her most favorite paintings to a cocktail; no matter how tired she was, she could look at “Femme au chapeau,” and it would revive her.
“Femme au chapeau” has an even longer association with San Francisco. Sarah and Michael Stein, the sister and brother-in-law of famed art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, brought the painting here in 1935 — the same year SFMOMA was founded – before selling it to Haas in 1948.
The painting’s debut in 1905 caused an immediate sensation for its fury of colors, frequently described as child-like. “It was one of our goals from the outset to bring together as many pictures as we could from Gallery VII or ‘the cage of wild beasts’ where Matisse and his peers exhibited their works at the Salon d’automne,” Bishop said.
Louis Vauxcelles, a French art critic, referred to Matisse and his peer André Derain, who appeared in the same show, as “wild beasts” because of their electric palettes. Fauve, or beast in English, stuck and the style became known as Fauvism.
Curators drew together Derain as well as other well known artists like Albert Marquet and Pierre Girieud and also lesser-known ones, like Jelka Rosen, the only woman to exhibit in the Salon.
The other six galleries composing the exhibition are devoted to various aspects of Matisse’s masterpiece: both immediate and contemporary works that drew from it for inspiration, with examples ranging from the direct gaze and red-capped self-portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne (1917) to Mickalene Thomas’s “Qusuquzah, une tres belle Negress 1” (2011), who fittingly became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in the Grand Palais — where the 1905 Salon d’automne was held.
There’s also a room devoted to other works from the Haas bequest. “It’s a show within a show,” Bishop said. “And it honors her extraordinary generosity.”
One of the most provocative aspects of the exhibition is its engagement with technology. Collaborating with Google’s Arts & Culture Lab, and using Google’s advanced AI video generation model Veo, curators re-create the Grand Palais environment by animating archival photographs and postcards.
Another installation, with animation but without the use of AI, resurrects the atmosphere of Leo and Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment, with images of artworks morphing from black-and-white to color to represent the order in which the art-collecting siblings purchased them. A third interpretive project includes kiosks near the end of the exhibition that allow viewers to peer inside and behind four of Matisse’s paintings, imagining the worlds surrounding them.
Erica Gangsei, SFMOMA’s head of interpretive media, said that arts and culture organizations need to be partnering more to develop AI tools; she believes the role of the artist is not simply to provide art to decorate the offices of technology headquarters.
“It’s so essential for artists to have a seat at the table when these tools are developed,” Gangsei said. “Artists are the original entrepreneurs.”
Could the integration of AI into the exhibition, which some artists refuse to adopt altogether, cause a scandal like Matisse’s bold use of color did in 1905? It’s hard to imagine.
“Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal” is at the SFMOMA from May 16 to Sept. 13, 2026.