Woman with Hat Painting - Essay Example

With the artist’s choice of portrait as a subject, use of energetic paint strokes, and combination of unusual colors, the painting stands out as a model of the essential characteristics of fauvism. Overall, Matisse has applied an active brushwork to depict his wives’ dress, skin, and feathered hat, together with the background of the portrait with weird vivid colors. The Woman with Hat Painting premiered in Salon d’Automne in the year 1905 and it has been presented through the oil on canvas medium, much more of a splattering of paint on the canvas material; this was an quite an unusual piece among Matisse’s contemporaries.

Through his successful art career, Henry Matisse became renowned as one of the giants of the 20th century art, and has ever since been readily recognized for his pioneering works that set the stage in the fauvist art style; in addition to the fauvist art style, Matisse was also identified with paper cut-outs later in his career. Even though Matisse was born to an artistically inclined mother, he received very little early encouragement to become an artist and so he proceeded to study law in Paris (Matisse b); however, after suffering appendicitis and being confined to bed, Matisse explored his artistic bent with a lot of encouragement from his mother who was keen to help him recover.

Overall, the Woman with hat painting was inspired by Matisse’s desire to challenge the rigid concepts of art to both the critic and the viewer in his period, which largely had evolved into a status quo. The Woman with hat painting was created in the 20th century period between 1905 to 1906 in Paris and was first exhibited in the Salon d’Automne in the year 1905; however, the portrait’s rough application of bright colors on the face, hat, dress, and even background was shocking to critics and Matisse’s contemporaries.

This period was defined by phenomenology, a concept that was familiarized by Edmund Husserl as an attempt to break down phenomenon into verifiable form in order to understand its essence (Ayanna). This concept inspired the creation of Woman with hat painting because the painting clearly reflects the essence of phenomenology as conceptualized by Husserl; using the proposed method of stratified formation, Matisse observes and challenges the phenomena of art. Through the Woman with heart painting, Matisse challenges the concept of art according to both the critic and the viewer in particular, and the concept of art in general; he established a model for modern art that came to be known as fauvism style.

The subject of the Woman with hat painting is a portrait that depicts Matisse’s wife in the oil on canvas artwork (Matisse b); this subject is recognizable to me today due to the massive influence of this pioneering fauvist work on modern art. However, this subject may not have been recognizable to the people in the time it was created due to the rigid concepts of the essence of art that existed at that time, until later when critics recognized fauvist style of art. The unusual bright color combinations heavily characterize the Woman with hat painting, and these have been utilized to symbolize the expression of Matisse’s wife; the artist’s use of color to capture expression rather than form is a radical idea that challenged the status quo that paintings should depict the subject matter accurately by using forms.

Similarly, the color symbol was not understandable to the people in the society in which this painting was created because the concept of fauvism was still uncommon at the time of completion of this painting. However, this color symbol is understandable to me today because the fauvism style of art has taken form and challenged the age-old