Date: 01-05-2005
Owning Institution: State Hermitage Museum
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 20th Century          

Today is May Day, so this week’s appropriately festive picture is The Dance, by Henri Matisse. It was one of two monumental panel pictures created by the artist in 1910 for his principal patron, the Russian businessman Sergei Schukhin, who originally hung them on the staircase of his mansion in Moscow. Together with its companion piece, Music, the work can now be seen in the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

“I like dance very much,” Matisse said, explaining the genesis of this stark and brightly coloured depiction of naked, convulsively cavorting figures. “Dance is an extraordinary thing: life and rhythm. It is easy for me to live with dance. When I had to compose a dance for Moscow   , I had just gone to the Moulin de la Galette on a Sunday afternoon. And I watched the dancing. I especially watched the farandole … This farandole was very gay. The dancers hold each other by the hands, they run across the room, and they wind around the people who are standing around … Back at home, I composed my dance on a canvas of four meters, singing the same tune that I had heard at the Moulin de la Galette, so that the entire composition and all the dancers are in harmony and dance to a single rhythm.”

In fact, the origins of The Dance are a little more complicated than the painter’s account might suggest. Some four years earlier, Matisse had created his first large canvas on the theme of Arcadia, that mythical earthly paradise where man lives in perfect harmony with nature. The Joy of Life was an extremely influential picture, in which Matisse pushed to unprecedented extremes the expressive, non-naturalistic language of painting that he had been developing since the early years of the twentieth century – and which had led one critic to christen him and his followers the “Fauves”, or “wild beasts”. That painting was the provocation that induced Picasso, Matisse’s junior by twelve years, to paint his own, answering canvas of the Demoiselles d’Avignon – a famously  dyspeptic vision of a corrupt, modern Arcadia, in the form of a brothel thronged with angular, harridan-like whores. But The Joy of Life also inspired Matisse himself to create a number of further, related works, and The Dance is in effect a massively blown up, slightly edited and somewhat simplified version of a single detail from that earlier picture – the group of six dancers, in a circle, shown in its middle distance, behind groups of figures variously lounging, stretching and caressing one another. In The Dance, those six dancers become five. Their bodies, painted in light, almost ethereal tones in The Joy of Life, have flushed to a vivid brick red. The hill on which they caper has been painted a bright green and the sky that throws their energies into such strong relief is a mottled, rich blue.

Green and red are complementaries and can seem to pulsate when placed in such strength and quantity, one beside the other, as in the picture reproduced here. These vibrant, almost vibrating colours were as important in expressing the idea of dance, to Matisse, as the forms of the dancers themselves. He later wrote to a friend that “The intensity of the colours was what seemed most important to me. I felt that these colours, no matter how they were applied to the surface – fresco, gouache, watercolour, coloured fabric – would be able to express the spirit of my composition.” In retrospect, he added, he had created certain effects unconsciously – so much so that the picture took even him by surprise when he saw it a little later. “When I saw the panels in Moscow, I was astonished to see that I had varied the density of colours with my brush, so that the whiteness of the canvas, showing through to different degrees, created the effect of a rather expensive moire¢.”

Various sources in Old Master painting have been proposed for Matisse’s dancing figures – from the revellers in Poussin’s various Bacchanales to the elegant muses in Mantegna’s Parnassus to the hand-holding dancers in Goya’s tapestry design for the Spanish court jnown as Blind Man’s Buff. But James Cuno has shown that in fact they were directly transposed from a seventeenth-century engraving by Agostino Carracci, after a painting attributed to Paolo Fiammingo entitled Reciproco Amore – a fantasy pastoral on the theme of “Love in the Golden Age”. The ambition behind Matisse’s work was to undo the sophisticated illusionism of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art, and to explore a mythical, magical, ritualistic idea of dancing in a different way – to paint not what human beings dancing actually look like, but to try to capture, instead, the very spirit of dancing in abandonment. Primitivism was in the air, and the artist may have had somewhere in his consciousness the late nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential descriptions of dancing as the most primal expression of man’s desires and emotions. The dance, Nietzsche had pronounced, contained “the eternal truths of Apollo and Dionysius”.

Sergei Shchukin, who commissioned the picture from Matisse, was nearly dissuaded from accepting the work after it received a vicious pasting from virtually every leading French art critic when first shown in Paris. He had had his doubts about whether to go ahead with the commission in the first place. When Matisse first put the idea to him, Schukin had written back to protest that he had recently taken in the three young daughters of a deceased relative – “and here in Russia (we are somewhat oriental) one cannot show nudes to young girls”. Eventually, however, he relented, and his bravery in eliciting and showing the picture matched Matisse’s daring in painting it. Great artists need great patrons, and the fact is that The Dance would never have been created without Shchukin’s far-sighted support. When asked if his father would ever have created such a monumental depiction of such an unusual subject, without Shchukin, Pierre Matisse simply and eloquently replied, “For whom?”