Dance
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) · 1910
Five naked figures, painted in a hot orange-red, join hands in a ring and whirl across a green hill under a deep blue sky. That is the whole picture: three colours, five bodies, and movement. The canvas is nearly four metres wide and the dancers are larger than life, so that standing in front of it you feel pulled into the circle. One figure at the front stretches to catch the hand of the next, and the gap between their fingers is the point where the whole ring seems about to break and spin faster.
Matisse painted it in 1910 for the Moscow textile merchant Sergei Shchukin, who wanted two huge panels for the staircase of his mansion, this one and its companion, Music, which hangs nearby. Shchukin first hesitated over the nudity, then accepted both. Look at the paint, which is thin and flat, with almost no modelling, and at the contours, which were drawn and redrawn until they had the tension of a bowstring. Matisse said he wanted a colour so intense that it would sing, and he arrived at these three tones only after a first, paler version, now in New York. The dancers' pose comes from a farandole he had watched fishermen dance in the south of France.
After the Revolution Shchukin's collection was nationalised, and in 1948, when Stalin closed the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow as a home of bourgeois formalism, the paintings were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. Dance came to Leningrad and spent years in storage before returning to view. It now anchors the Matisse rooms in the General Staff Building. Notice the green hill, which is not flat but curves like the top of the world, with the dancers' feet barely touching it.
Did You Know? Shchukin wrote to Matisse that he was ashamed to hang nudes on his staircase, then changed his mind and accepted both panels.
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