Matisse | La Dance

About La Dance by Henri Matisse

Matisse painted this version of La Danse in March 1909, as the compositional study for a commission. Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant who had assembled the largest collection of new French painting anywhere in the world, wanted two large panels for the staircase of his mansion. Matisse already had the motif to hand: a ring of dancers he had put in the far distance of Le Bonheur de vivre three years earlier, now brought forward and blown up to fill a canvas almost four metres wide.

The whole picture is three colours. Warm pink for the bodies, green for the ground, blue for the sky. There is no modelling, no cast shadow, no perspective, no horizon line and almost nothing that could be called a face. The figures are life-size, and the panel was meant to be read from below and at speed as you climbed a staircase, which is what the simplification is for.

Matisse repainted the composition in 1910 as the finished panel, with the bodies in brick red instead of pink. That version went to Moscow with its companion, Music, and is now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. The 1909 study passed through private hands and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963.

Own a hand-painted La Dance

Flat colour is the whole picture here, and it is the thing a print gets nearly right and therefore ruins. Matisse painted this version thinly, as a study: the colour is dragged across the cloth rather than built up on it, so the weave of the canvas reads through the blue almost everywhere, and in places the pale ground shows at the edge of a limb. The blue is a stained fabric, not a sheet. Print the same image and the colour arrives as an opaque, mechanically even ink film on a smooth surface with no texture beneath it at all — which is exactly why Dance reproduces as a poster, and why it has spent a century being mistaken for one. Painted by hand in oils on real canvas, the weave stays under the colour and the picture reads as a painted surface rather than a printed graphic.