Striped Jacket 1914

This is Henri Matisse’s “Striped Jacket,” an easel painting in oil, capturing a woman in, well, a striped jacket. I can imagine Matisse, a real magician of color, stepping back, squinting, pushing paint around—those stripes are practically vibrating! Think about it—how many blues did he test before he got that juicy, just-right hue? And the background, it's like a hazy dream of greens and yellows, setting off her cool gaze. The hat is a bit playful, maybe suggesting that line between the ordinary and the fabulous. There is a feeling that this painting exists because he was willing to let go, experiment, and really see what the paint could do. It's a feeling you get from other painters like Bonnard. When you look at this, you think of all the conversations he had with other artists, all the shared ideas about how to really look and then how to make us look, too.