Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

May 16–September 13, 2026

Henri Matisse ignited passionate controversy in 1905 with the public debut of Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat) at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. The portrait of the artist’s wife, Amélie, was at the center of a defining moment of rupture in the history of modern art, shocking audiences with its seemingly carefree brushstrokes and bright hues that purposefully departed from observed reality. It was established as the leading image of Fauvism, the first French avant-garde art movement of the 20th century.

From May 16 to September 13, 2026, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal, a major exhibition illuminating how the painting—now an icon of the museum’s collection—made its mark on art history. Positioning Matisse in dialogue with his peers, subsequent generations, as well as artists working today, the exhibition will examine in greater depth than ever before the painting’s historical context, subject, provenance, circulation through exhibitions and publications, and impact over more than a century.

The exhibition will also explore how the painting marked a pivotal moment in Matisse’s career, as it captured the attention of American expatriate collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein who, while living in Paris, acquired the work on the last day of the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition. In 1915, Femme au chapeau made its way to the Paris collection of their brother and sister-in-law, Michael and Sarah Stein, who brought it from France to the Bay Area in 1935. Matisse’s painting was shown in the US for the first time the following year, in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) organized by its founding director, Grace McCann Morley. Since entering the museum’s collection in 1991 as a bequest of Levi’s heiress Elise S. Haas, who had purchased the work from Sarah Stein in 1948, it has continued to resonate with contemporary artists, who find inspiration in its bold approach to color and form. Under the terms of its bequest, Femme au chapeau does not travel, making SFMOMA the exclusive venue for this landmark exhibition.

“We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share the full story of Matisse’s Femme au chapeau—a painting that is emblematic of the artist’s radical break from convention in the early years of his career,” said Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator. “Arguably SFMOMA’s most art-historically significant work of art, Femme au chapeau began sending shockwaves through the art world as soon as it left Matisse’s studio and has captivated viewers ever since. The exhibition will shed light on the painting in more detail than ever before, from its public debut in Paris in 1905, to its years as a must-see painting in Leo and Gertrude Stein’s Left Bank apartment, and, eventually to the walls of SFMOMA.

“Part of our vision at SFMOMA is to encourage our visitors to see the world—and art—in new ways. Matisse’s Femme au chapeau has long been a cornerstone of SFMOMA’s collection; through this exhibition we are able to consider the initial shock and enduring impact of this remarkable artwork through a range of different perspectives,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “With stunning paintings by Matisse and his peers, as well as work by some of the most exceptional artists working today, this exhibition promises to captivate SFMOMA visitors this spring.”

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

The heart of the exhibition will restage the public debut of Matisse’s Femme au chapeau in Gallery VII of the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris. This gallery inspired the moniker fauve (wild beasts), coined in a review by critic Louis Vauxcelles in the October 17, 1905, issue of the periodical Gil Blas. Designed to echo the architectural context of the Salon, this space will feature work by all 10 of the artists included in the original presentation and will reunite the greatest number of objects from that gallery since 1905. The recreation of this seminal display will illuminate how and why works by Matisse, Charles Camoin, André Derain, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet and Maurice de Vlaminck, among others sparked such heated debate and admiration during their time.

Other galleries will include focused analyses of different aspects of Femme au chapeau’s subject and history. An opening section will introduce the painting’s model, Amélie Matisse, as both a professional hat-maker and partner and close collaborator to Matisse. It will investigate the broader fashions of the time that informed her choice of headwear in the painting. Another explores the painting’s journey from the Paris salon to San Francisco as well as its circulation through exhibitions, and reproductions. Animated large-scale projections of both the Grand Palais and Leo and Gertrude Stein’s Left Bank apartment will provide immersive experiences, fostering further connections between visitors and the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde.

The final chapters of the exhibition will trace how artists have responded to Matisse’s painting over time—from works made by his peers such as Jacqueline Marval, Jean Metzinger, Kees Van Dongen, and Maurice de Vlaminck during or in the immediate aftermath of the Salon to those by artists working today such as Hilary Harkness, Rachel Harrison, David Hockney and others.The exhibition also uncovers its impact closer to home on Bay Area Figurative artists like Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park.

Woman with a Hat (Femme au chapeau), painted around 1905–1906 by the French Fauvist artist Maurice de Vlaminck.

Tulipes et vitrail (Tulips and Stained Glass), an oil on canvas painted in 1905 by French Fauvist artist Pierre Girieud. 

André Derain, Henri Matisse, 1905; Tate;© 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), Courtesy of Tate

Fishing Boats, Collioure, an oil on canvas painting created in 1905 by André Derain

Paysage: Les genêts (Landscape: Broom) by Henri Matisse, painted in 1905–1906.

CATALOGUE

A richly illustrated 128-page book will accompany the exhibition, published by SFMOMA in association with DelMonico Books · DAP (Distributed Art Publishers). The volume will examine in unprecedented depth how Henri Matisse’s portrait of his wife Amélie impacted more than a century of art history. Contributors include Janet Bishop, Maria Castro, Claudine Grammont, Alison Guh, and Popy Venzal.

ORGANIZATION

Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal is organized by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Maria Castro, former Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture with Alison Guh, Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

 Roy Lichtenstein changed the way we see images. One of the defining artists of the Pop art movement, he turned the visual language of mass culture, comics, advertising, consumer goods, and commercial printing, into some of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century. His work looked cool, crisp, and machine-made, but was meticulously handmade, revealing an artist fascinated by how images are built, copied, enlarged, circulated, and made new.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New offers a bold reconsideration of Lichtenstein for the present. Bringing together roughly 130 works made from the early 1940s through the 1990s, the exhibition traces how his early interest in perception and visual recognition shaped a career-long investigation into duplication, simulation, and image culture. Across painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture, and film, Lichtenstein treated images as unstable forms that could be borrowed, translated, reframed, and transformed.

The exhibition features many of Lichtenstein’s most celebrated works, including

Look Mickey (1961), 

Girl with Ball (1961), 

Masterpiece (1962), 

Drowning Girl (1963), 

Happy Tears (1964), 

Little Big Painting (1965),

 

Rouen Cathedral, Set III (1968-69), and 

Artist’s Studio “The Dance” (1974). 

It also includes a recreation of three murals

including a nearly 96-foot long iteration of Greene Street Mural (1983). 

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New also reunites, for the first time, all the works from Lichtenstein’s first exhibition of Pop-style work at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. This pivotal moment for the artist would come to define an era with its impact extended far beyond Pop, shaping generations of artists, including Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant whose work will also be on view in this exhibition and further illuminate Lichtenstein’s relationship to copying, influence, appropriation, and the afterlife of images.

In an era when pictures are endlessly cropped, filtered, reposted, and recirculated, Lichtenstein’s work feels newly urgent. Like New looks beyond the artist’s iconic surfaces to reveal the power and instability of images and celebrate an artist who understood, long before the digital age, that images change as they move through the world.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New is organized by Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and Alex Da Corte, Guest Curator, with Nakai Falcón, Curatorial Assistant, and David Crane, Curatorial Research Associate.

Major transformation of Buckingham Palace’s Picture Gallery

Buckingham Palace 

9 July to 27 September 2026

Paintings by Rubens, Caravaggio and Zoffany are among 120 masterpieces from the Royal Collection going on display for visitors to Buckingham Palace from Thursday, 9 July, as part of a major re-display in one of the Palace’s most important reception rooms.

The Picture Gallery, one of the State Rooms that open to visitors each summer, has undergone a once-in-a-generation re-display, almost doubling the number of paintings on show from 63 to 120. 

The new presentation puts more works by some of the world’s greatest artists on show, bringing together paintings in inspiring and new ways. 

Curators have drawn on historic watercolours, photographs, inventories and architectural schemes to devise the new display, which took 875 hours to hang and brings the room closer to its historic appearance. New emerald-green silk wall hangings and updated lighting, together with the increased number of paintings, create a striking visual transformation.

A highlight of the re-display is

The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany, a German artist active in Britain, which depicts the famed Florentine gallery filled with masterpieces and animated by visitors studying,  discussing and enjoying works of art. Although commissioned by Queen Charlotte, the painting was never hung in her apartments, reportedly displeasing its royal patron with its crowded and unconventional composition. It was later recorded in the Picture Gallery in 1841, making its inclusion in the new display particularly fitting. 

The painting forms part of a major new addition to the room: a display illustrating the flourishing of British art in the 18th century, reflecting Queen Victoria’s hang in the 1840s. Visitors will also see A Rough Dog by George Stubbs, believed to show George IV's pet dog, and

Thomas Gainsborough’s elegant portrait ​​​of Johann Christian Fischer.

Five paintings by Rembrandt and one attributed to his studio are now hung together and demonstrate the breadth of the artist’s work. The re-display also unites seven works by Rubens. 

A standout pairing is

Rubens’s Self Portrait, shown alongside his newly added 

portrait of Anthony Van Dyck. Displayed facing one another, the hang reflects their friendship in real life (Van Dyck joined Rubens’s studio as a teenager) and recreates history – the two portraits were known to hang together at Whitehall Palace in the 1660s. 

George IV’s painting collection was one of the finest holdings of 17th-century Dutch paintings in the world.

Vermeer’s Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman. 

A striking work in the new display is

The Letter by Vermeer’s contemporary Gerard ter Borch. This intimate scene of a woman with a letter draws the eye to the sumptuous textures of her silk satin dress, while inviting speculation about whether the message has just been written or received.

The new additions to the room join remaining highlight works including 12 scenes of Venice by Canaletto, 

Canaletto’s The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day

Frans Hals’s charismatic Portrait of a Man and

Titian and his workshop’s Madonna and Child in a Landscape with Tobias and the Angel (c. 1535–40) 

An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection

 Clark Art Institute

June 13, 2026, through February 21, 2027

The Clark Art Institute today announced details of its upcoming exhibition An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection, on view June 13, 2026, through February 21, 2027. The exhibition of approximately 150 works is the first public presentation of selections from the Tavitian Collection, one of the most significant private collections of European art formed in North America in the 21st century. 

The presentation brings together a vibrant range of paintings, sculpture, drawings, and decorative arts from more than four centuries of artistic production (c. 1450-1850). An Exquisite Eye includes rare early Netherlandish painting, Italian Renaissance sculpture, Baroque portraiture, and eighteenth-century French works by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, offering a compelling view of the collection’s depth across mediums and geography. 

A central interpretive element in the exhibition’s design is a large-scale map tracing the geographic origins of selected objects, inviting visitors to follow the circulation of artists, materials, and artistic traditions across regions and time periods.

Assembled by the late collector, philanthropist, and connoisseur Aso O. Tavitian, the Collection is comprised of 331 paintings, sculpture, drawings, and decorative arts of exceptional quality and rarity. Featuring works by many of the most acclaimed artists of the early modern era—Jan van Eyck, Andrea della Robbia, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jacques-Louis David, among others—the gift significantly strengthens the Clark’s holdings, particularly in early modern European art, and more than doubles the size of the sculpture collection. 

The collection will go on view in 2028 when the Clark opens the new Aso O. Tavitian Wing, designed by Selldorf Architects, adjacent to the current permanent collection galleries.

“This exhibition marks a defining moment for the Clark,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute. “The Tavitian Collection represents an extraordinary act of generosity and vision, one that profoundly expands our ability to present the history of European art at the highest level.”

“One of the most exciting aspects of the Tavitian Collection as it will be presented in An Exquisite Eye is the way in which it brings to life how deeply interconnected artists and artistic traditions were in early modern Europe,” said Lara Yeager-Crasselt, Aso O. Tavitian Curator of Early Modern European Painting & Sculpture.

Reflecting Tavitian’s deeply personal and discerning eye, the collection is distinguished by its intimacy and refinement. Portraiture is a particular strength of the Tavitian Collection, alongside religious and mythological subjects, landscapes, and still lifes. The collection invites close looking and sustained engagement, while offering a sweeping view of artistic production across Europe during a period of profound cultural transformation.

Highlights of An Exquisite Eye include:

·         Jan van Eyck, Madonna at the Fountain, c. 1440, a rare workshop replica that demonstrates the artist’s revolutionary approach to naturalism and the devotional function of small-scale painting, showing an astonishing range of optical effects through color, light, and detail

·         

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Little Bouquet in a Roemer, c. 1619, an early example of floral still life painting that merges scientific observation with artistic invention

·         

Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Margaret Lemon, c. 1638, an intimate and psychologically charged portrait that offers insight into the artist’s personal and professional relationships in seventeenth-century London

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Little Lise, 1775, a refined marble bust that exemplifies the artist’s stature as one of the most sought-after portrait sculptors of the French Enlightenment 

·         

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Rhine Falls, near Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1779, a dramatic landscape inspired by the artist’s travels, capturing the wonder of a natural phenomenon that was a site of international fascination

·   

Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self Portrait in Studio Costume, c. 1800, an arresting image painted in exile in which the artist—a favorite of Queen Marie Antoinette—presents herself both as painter and subject

Additional works by Andrea della Robbia, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Louis-Léopold Boilly further underscore the collection’s breadth.

“An Exquisite Eye reflects both the extraordinary discernment of Aso O. Tavitian and the Clark’s commitment to presenting exceptional works that invite deeper understanding,” said Esther Bell, Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator, and incoming Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute. “This presentation offers an early glimpse of the collection’s depth while building anticipation for its future home in the Clark’s new Aso O. Tavitian Wing.”

Organized by the Clark Art Institute, An Exquisite Eye is curated by Esther Bell, Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator and incoming Hardymon Director; and Lara Yeager-Crasselt, Aso O. Tavitian Curator of Early Modern European Painting and Sculpture. The presentation introduces the newly created curatorial role occupied by Yeager-Crasselt, which affirms the institution’s long-term commitment to the study and stewardship of the collection. The Tavitian gift also includes more than $45 million to support the ongoing care, study, and presentation of the collection, including the endowed curatorial position and the construction of the new wing.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings

 Clark Art Institute

 July 4 through September 27, 2026

More than a landscape, the coastline is a site of labor, leisure, and national history. As the margin where the United States meets the Atlantic Ocean, the nation’s Eastern coastline has fostered vital encounters where artists, coastal culture, and the natural world converge. CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings draws almost entirely from the Clark’s collection, bringing together a vast range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of life along the shore. The exhibition is on view in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper in the Clark’s Manton Research Center from July 4 through September 27, 2026.  

“This exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the American coastline not simply as a geographic boundary but as a dynamic space shaped by commerce, migration, and tourism,” said Esther Bell, incoming Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute.

Hannah Chew, a member of the Class of 2026 in the Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art, curated the exhibition under the direction of Anne Leonard, the Clark’s Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

“Coinciding with the American semi-quincentennial, CoastLines encourages viewers to consider how the coastal landscape and its communities have shaped American culture and history over the last two centuries,” said exhibition curator Hannah Chew.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Focused on works by American artists depicting the Eastern Coast of the United States and their sojourns across the Atlantic, this exhibition explores the coastline as a site of contact and exchange, the stage for economic and cultural activity, and a terrain rich in American mythology.

These artistic representations of the coastline reveal the contradictions and complications of American identity. The Eastern seaboard holds a layered national history: from ports that participated in the transatlantic slave trade to the development of the nation’s early economy to the later emergence of leisure tourism and wilderness preservation. American artists along the coast grappled with these tensions, and their artistic experiments at the edge of the Atlantic created a distinctive national style with international influences, while drawing inspiration from both sensational popular media and lofty notions of the sublime.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Hannah Chew, Class of 2026, Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art.

LABOR AND LEISURE

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the coastline offered economic opportunity as a site of trade, industry, and communication in the growing young nation. As more people moved to and lived along the shore, communities dependent on the sea developed unique cultures and relationships to the coastline that were shaped by the ocean’s power and unpredictability. Access to the Atlantic Ocean also made the coastline a destination for leisure. Over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, America’s tourism industry grew rapidly, and seaside resorts, recreational fishing, and beaches drew visitors seeking beauty and escape. Consequently, these dual modes of interaction—work and play—coexisted along the shore. American artists, inspired by both the intensity of maritime labor and the sublime landscape, often occupied a space between these two extremes: they settled in artist colonies, traveled widely, and worked enthusiastically.

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910) captures the thrilling sportsmanship of fishing through a striking reversal of scale in A Good Pool, Saguenay River (1895). The hooked ouananiche, or landlocked salmon, fills the foreground, while the fishermen and their canoe navigate choppy waters in the distance. The dramatic composition recalls illustrations in popular sporting magazines, emphasizing the thrill and spectacle of the catch.

In the watercolor The Eagle’s Nest (1902), Homer depicts the awe and excitement of two outdoorsmen rushing to glimpse a pair of eagles soaring above their nest. As industrialization transformed the American landscape, city dwellers sought escape in the wilderness. Scenes like this one reflect the growing popularity of amateur naturalist pursuits that arose out of these trends. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the nature tourism industry had expanded dramatically, often at the expense of both the ecosystems and the Indigenous communities that inhabited waterways.

STORM AND STORY

In 1881, Homer took a trip to Cullercoats on the coast of England’s North Sea, where he witnessed the dramatic search and rescue operation following the shipwreck of the Iron Crown. The heroic efforts of the town’s lifesaving brigade would inspire some of his most successful work over the next decade. After his stay in England, the artist returned to the East Coast of the United States in search of more sea rescues.

Life Line (1884, probably printed c. 1940) was Homer’s first published etching, translating into ink the artist’s extremely successful 1884 oil painting of the same name. Suspended between storm and raging sea, a rescuer in a device called a breeches buoy clutches a woman as an unseen crew hauls them to the shore. Neither the wrecked ship nor the coastline is visible in Homer’s composition, heightening the sense of drama in the confrontation between human and sea.

Homer completed the etching Saved (1889) a few years after finishing the Life Line print, copying and reworking elements from his paintings. While the Life Line etching attempted to faithfully reproduce the original painting, Saved is a far more experimental and creative reinterpretation.

Homer’s illustrations of shipwrecks were featured in newspapers and periodicals, feeding a growing public appetite for sensational scenes of danger, loss, and survival at sea. The scenes also became the basis for some of Homer’s most revered paintings, like Undertow (1886), on view in the Clark’s permanent collection galleries.

INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE

Throughout the nineteenth century, American artists often looked to French and British academic painters and critics for inspiration. Academic art instruction in the United States was only beginning to emerge, so many young artists sought training abroad, especially in Paris, where studios and academies provided crucial technical instruction. Meanwhile, the written work of British and French art critics, such as writer and artist John Ruskin (English, 1819–1900), circulated internationally and shaped artistic standards and ideas about the role of art in society.

Few artists or scholars shaped the education of American painters as profoundly as Ruskin. His writings—on drawing technique, on Venice, and on the painter J. M. W. Turner (English, 1775–1851)—were widely read by American artists, including many featured in the exhibition. Ruskin was also a skilled draftsman and painter. His watercolor 

Sunset over the Mountains (c. 1845) is likely a page from one of his sketchbooks where he took notes while working out a composition.

Traveling artists often brought with them easy-to-transport sketchbooks and watercolor materials, producing drawings that could be brought back and further developed in their studios. Upon their return, American artists adapted their European lessons to American subjects and settings, exploring new inspirations that shaped the course of American art.

Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926), who greatly admired J. M. W. Turner and John Ruskin, followed in their footsteps to Venice, which he declared “an inexhaustible mine of pictorial treasures.”

 

In View of Venice (1887), Moran explored the subtleties of opaque watercolor and Ruskinian techniques of drawing.

VESSELS AND VOYAGES

Portraits of maritime vessels and pictorial inventories of ports were popular subjects in early American art, and in the nineteenth century, ships also often took on a symbolic resonance. Representations of seafaring vessels carried layered meanings: they evoked naval power, technological ingenuity, far-reaching exploration, and growing networks of global commerce. Ships served as cultural, political, and economic intermediaries between Americans, their natural environment, and the global community. While some artists and writers chose shipwreck narratives to illustrate the dramatic conflict between man and sea, others instead employed the rich iconography of maritime culture to symbolize personal journeys or broader narratives of national progress.

In 1930, Rockwell Kent (American, 1882–1971) published N by E, a novel that follows the artist’s 1929 voyage from New York harbor to Greenland. Kent documented his journey with striking illustrations and playful prose, detailing the perils of sailing, as well as his shipwreck and eventual rescue in Greenland. As stories of ambitious adventurers and dangerous voyages surged in popularity, Kent positioned himself as both a seasoned explorer and an innovative artist.

 

His 1930 illustration Close Hauled refers to the position of a boat oriented closely to the wind direction, allowing the vessel to move upwind.

Beyond artistic exchange, ships and seafaring images also register the United States’ transatlantic and global encounters. American vessels carried goods, people, and capital across the Atlantic, and seafaring was central to commerce, diplomacy, and imperial ambition. Ships and the routes they traveled gesture toward the economic ambition and political claims that linked the United States to the rest of the world.