Zachary Fine

1. Article · Aug 31, 2026 · Zachary Fine

   Matisse’s Ugliest Painting (opens the original)

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   Matisse’s “Femme au Chapeau” (1905), or “Woman with a Hat,” is a strong contender for my least favorite masterpiece of the twentieth century. When it was first exhibited, in Paris, waves of journalists ridiculed it, viewers laughed and jeered, and at least one person tried to scratch it with their nails. More than enough time has passed to wise up to its charms, but I still can’t reconcile myself to the shock of its ugliness. The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy th

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2. Article · Aug 10, 2026 · Zachary Fine

   Pope.L’s Pleasing Refusal to Be Interpreted (opens the original)

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   We’re familiar with the idea that art is a sublimated form of madness, but the artist William Pope.L liked to hint it was the other way around. His major works include “ATM Piece” (1997), in which he attached himself to the door of a Chase bank with a chain of sausage links while wearing only Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, and “Eating the Wall Street Journal” (2000), which involved him sitting on a raised toilet, eating the newspaper for multiple hours a day, for mu

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3. Article · Jul 29, 2026 · Zachary Fine

   Fairfield Porter’s Lush, Lonely Vision of the World (opens the original)

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   The poet John Ashbery, in 1983, said that Fairfield Porter was “perhaps the major American artist of the century.” It’s not praise you can take at face value—Ashbery and Porter were good friends—but it’s a tempting thought. How might a painter of limited technical skill, who mostly depicted coastal landscapes and living rooms in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, be considered a major American artist? “Perhaps” is the key word in Ashbery’s phrase, a little escape hatch that admi

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4. Article · Jul 13, 2026 · Zachary Fine

   The Met Turns Orientalism Inside Out (opens the original)

   Excerpt · Positive tone · English

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   Few great writers have been as brainlessly happy as Gustave Flaubert in Egypt. From the moment he arrived, in the autumn of 1849, every detail pinched him with exotic perfection. The color of the earth reminded him of Nubian flesh, and the water looked like melted silver. He smoked long pipes while sprawled out on divans, wearing a red tarboosh. He slept with courtesans and dancers, and went to a bathhouse hoping to “skewer” a young boy. He also couldn’t get enough of the camels, the way they mo

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