Dance
Five red figures dance in a ring against blue and green. Just three colours, large areas. Matisse wanted colour to act directly, almost like music.
The ring is broken where two hands almost touch – that is where the tension lies.
Henri Matisse painted Dance in 1909–1910, commissioned by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. Shchukin had one of the world’s largest collections of modern French art in his palace in Moscow. He commissioned two large paintings for the staircase: Dance and Music. Matisse had earlier painted a first version of Dance, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Five naked figures dance in a ring on a green hill against a deep blue sky. The bodies are red and drawn with a few strong outlines. The figures lean, stretch and swing, and the ring seems to rotate. At the front the ring is broken: two hands almost reach each other but do not meet.
The composition is very simple. The picture consists of three large fields of colour and five figures. There is almost no depth, and the figures are large in relation to the surface. Movement arises from the curving lines of the bodies and from the way the ring runs around almost the entire picture surface.
Colour is the main thing. Matisse used a strong red for the bodies, an intense green for the ground and a deep blue for the sky. He aimed for the colours to act directly on the viewer. They are laid down in large areas without shading. Matisse was a leading figure of Fauvism, the movement that a few years earlier had caused a stir with its strong, unmodulated colours.
The painting is in oil on canvas and is nearly four metres wide. The format was designed for the staircase of Shchukin’s house. The motif of figures dancing in a ring already appeared in Matisse’s earlier painting Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life). Dance has been linked both to folk dances and to ancient depictions of dance. The difference from the first version is clear: there the bodies are pale pink and the movement calmer, while in the Hermitage version they are an intense red and the dance wilder.
When Dance and Music were shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1910, they met with a great deal of criticism. Shchukin hesitated for a while, partly because of the nude figures, but eventually accepted them. After the Russian Revolution his collection was nationalised. It was later divided between museums in Moscow and Leningrad, and Dance ended up in the Hermitage in what is now St Petersburg. Shchukin left Russia after the Revolution and died in Paris in 1936. The companion piece, Music, in which five red figures play and sing, is also in the Hermitage.
Dance is regarded as one of the most important works of the 20th century. It shows how simplification and pure colour can create a powerful experience of movement and joy of life. The work has influenced many later artists and designers.