Dance (I)
Henri Matisse (1869 to 1954) · Early 1909
Five naked figures hold hands and whirl in a ring on a green hill under a blue sky. That is the whole picture, and it is nearly four metres wide. There is no landscape detail, no faces to speak of, just bodies drawn with a few flowing lines and filled with pale pink, and the circle of the dance that spins from one figure to the next. On the left, one dancer strains to reach the hand of the figure in front, and the gap between their hands gives the whole ring its tension.
Matisse painted this canvas quickly in early 1909 as a full size study for a commission from the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who wanted two panels, Dance and Music, for the staircase of his Moscow mansion. The final Dance, with figures in deep red on darker blue and green, is now in Saint Petersburg. Here the colours are softer and the mood lighter, and you can see Matisse thinking on the canvas: look at the pentimenti where he adjusted arms and legs, and at the way the green ground bulges upward as if the dancers' feet had pushed it out of shape.
When the finished version was shown in Paris in 1910 it was attacked as crude and childish, but Matisse insisted that it had life and rhythm. The dance, he said, came from a farandole he had watched fishermen dancing at Collioure and from the Sunday dancers at the Moulin de la Galette. The study came to MoMA in 1963 as a gift from Nelson Rockefeller in honour of Alfred Barr. Stand well back and let the circle move; then go close and see how thin and quick the paint is.
Did You Know? Matisse painted this enormous canvas as a study and kept it rolled in his studio for years; it was the version the Russian collector Shchukin first approved from a photograph.
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