Dance (1910)

Five red-orange figures join in a round dance on a green hill beneath a deep blue sky. One leans so far forward that the circle almost opens at the lower centre; another stretches across the top to keep it connected. Henri Matisse made this 1910 Dance for the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, who commissioned it as a companion to Music for his home's staircase. The painting now belongs to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It is the finished Shchukin panel, distinct from Matisse's paler, full-size Dance (I) of 1909 at MoMA and from the later dance mural he made for the Barnes Foundation.^[1][2][3][4]

Which Dance is pictured here?

The Hermitage identifies its work as oil on canvas, 260 × 391 centimetres, signed and dated at the lower right, with inventory number 9673. The museum dates its making to 1909–10 and catalogues the completed panel as 1910. Its strong red figures, rich blue field and green rise match the work reproduced on this page. These owner facts are useful safeguards when several paintings bear nearly the same name. A title such as Dance, La Danse or Dance II does not, on its own, tell a reader which canvas a text describes.^[1][2]

MoMA's 1909 Dance (I) is a separate oil painting, also monumental at 260.4 × 390.4 centimetres. It has the same five-figure circular design, but its figures are pale peach-pink and its handling is looser. MoMA records it as a rapid compositional study for the Shchukin commission. The near-equal dimensions are important: it was a study at the scale of the intended decoration, not a little drawing later enlarged. A comparison between the two lets us see Matisse thinking through a whole wall-sized arrangement.^[3]

A third major work called The Dance belongs to the Barnes Foundation. It was commissioned by Albert C. Barnes decades later, in 1930, and completed in 1932–33 for the spaces above the doors of the Barnes gallery. Its three canvases, architectural shape and later date make it another project, not a version of the Shchukin staircase panel. The subject recurs across Matisse's career, but the present page is anchored to the Hermitage's 1910 painting.^[4]

What is happening in the painting?

The five nude dancers occupy a broad oval within the rectangular canvas. Their arms connect across the top and sides while legs spring, plant or swing over the hill. At the left, a tall body bends toward the next dancer, joining the ring with an outstretched arm. Across the top, the figures lean and lift, stretching the chain toward the right edge. At the bottom, a more horizontal body travels toward the left, making the eye feel the distance it has to cross before the sequence can close. The group is both a set of distinct poses and a single circulating movement.^[1][2]

The hands are crucial. They give the figures a shared action, yet the joining is not mechanically perfect. Near the lower centre, the reach between dancers appears strained: movement has carried one body almost beyond the other's grasp. This near-opening keeps the circle from looking like an emblem drawn with a compass. We can feel momentum in the uncertainty of the link. Nothing in the museum records makes that interval a specific symbol of loss, conflict or exclusion; its visible role is to animate the ring.^[1]

Feet make the movement equally varied. Some press against the green slope while others leave it; bent and extended legs interrupt any regular march. The body at lower centre comes forward and seems to pull the chain down toward us. A figure at the right rises away from it, sending the eye upward again. Matisse did not arrange five identical dancers at even points around a circle. He varied their heights, directions and contact with the ground so that the viewer follows a continuous action with changing pace.^[1][2]

The painting does not specify a named dance, time of day, instrument or audience. Its people have no detailed costumes or individualized portraits. A viewer may recognize the social form of a round dance, but the bare hill and undivided sky strip away the particulars of a performance. Matisse makes the bodily act itself the subject: linked hands, shared balance, and the effort needed to carry a circle across uneven ground.^[1][2]

How does the composition make the circle move?

The canvas is much wider than it is high, yet the principal movement is circular. Matisse resolves that tension by letting the oval of bodies fill the available width. The chain presses close to the left and right sides, while the upper figures rise into the blue and the lower figure sweeps over green. The rectangle holds the dance but does not tame it into a centred, static emblem. A person standing before a nearly four-metre span must move the eyes, or even shift position, to follow the whole sequence.^[1]

The Hermitage describes the forces in the composition as both outward and inward. That is visible in the poses. Extended arms and swinging legs push bodies away from a common centre, while linked hands pull them back toward it. The hill helps hold the action: it rises under the feet and falls away where the figures leap. Its upper edge is more than a background division. It gives the dancers a surface to press against and a curve that answers their ring.^[1][2]

The strongest directional line may be the one the figures create together. Begin at the left dancer's bent torso, follow the joined arms over the top, descend the right side, then cross the bottom figure's long reach toward the starting point. No drawn circle encloses them. The circuit exists because our eye joins those changing contours. At the vulnerable lower link, we supply the short continuation that the hands almost, but do not comfortably, complete. That participation helps the mural feel active despite its small number of elements.^[1]

Matisse also varies the apparent weight of each figure. The tall left body stands with a broad, firm silhouette; the upper pair arch or lift; the lower body cuts diagonally across the hill. A perfectly symmetrical arrangement would distribute weight evenly and slow the dance. Here the eye encounters one counterweight after another. The group's balance is achieved through differing poses, not through mirrored ones. This makes the composition feel ordered without making its energy disappear.^[1]

Why are there so few colours?

The painted world is organised principally through red-orange, blue and green. Red-orange distinguishes the human figures; green gives them a rising ground; blue opens around their arms and torsos. The Hermitage emphasizes this simplified scheme, and the 1910 canvas shows how powerfully it works at architectural scale. From across a room, the bodies register as a continuous warm chain against cooler surroundings. Closer to the painting, their different contours become clear without a crowd of small descriptive details.^[1][2]

The colours do not behave as ordinary atmospheric description. The blue is broad and deep rather than modulated into a detailed sky. Green is a strong shape rather than a meadow filled with individual plants. Skin is far warmer and more uniform than a naturalistic record would demand. These choices free Matisse to make every boundary between body and setting legible. A red arm crossing blue can be read instantly; a foot meeting green announces the contact with the hill. Simplification serves the movement.^[1][2]

Yet the work is not merely three neatly cut-out flat blocks. The silhouettes bend and change; lines of bodies overlap; the slope rises beneath one foot and recedes beneath another. The strong colour areas support a complicated sequence of near-touching hands and unequally placed limbs. This is one reason a small reproduction can be deceptive. It conveys the triad quickly, but the life of the mural also depends on the scale and variation of its contours.^[1]

Calling the work “Fauvist” may orient it within Matisse's use of liberated colour, but that label alone explains little about this particular commission. The three principal colours here are also a practical means of addressing a stairway wall. They keep the circling figures readable at a distance and allow the painting to function as a decoration in a large domestic interior. Its colour is expressive, spatial and architectural at once.^[1][5]

What do the open spaces contribute?

It is easy to focus only on the red figures, but the blue between them is equally active. Above the lower dancer's back, a wide opening lets the eye pass into the centre of the ring. Between the upper bodies, smaller blue intervals keep limbs from fusing into a single bar. Around the outside, the same blue runs to the canvas edges and makes the dancers look exposed in a vast field. The apparent emptiness gives each pose room to turn, leap or lean. If the figures filled all these gaps, their joined movement would become a heavy mass rather than a chain of changing bodies.^[1]

The green hill plays a different role in the spaces. It enters the lower part of the oval and meets some feet, while the centre of the ring remains largely blue. That arrangement stops the dance from appearing to happen on a flat floor viewed straight on. The ground seems to swell up under a step and fall away under a leap. The Hermitage's description of the hill as responding to the dancers reflects this close relation between the land's contour and their actions. We need not decide whether the scene depicts a real outdoor place; the two broad colours are enough to create pressure, support and release.^[1]

At the lower near-gap, negative space becomes a moment of suspense. A small interval between reaching hands carries more energy because all the other connections have trained us to expect touch. The empty patch is not a coded narrative clue, but it is formally precise. It distinguishes the ring from a sealed loop and lets us imagine its movement continuing beyond this instant. That is a close-reading inference from what the painting shows, rather than a claim that Matisse documented a particular split in a dance he watched.^[1]

Why did Shchukin ask for a dance panel?

Sergei Shchukin was a Moscow collector who bought Matisse's work and wanted large paintings for his house. The commission took shape through visits, letters and revised ideas in early 1909. The Hermitage catalogue says Matisse was already working on the first version of Dance in the spring when Shchukin commissioned a canvas of similar size and design for his staircase. MoMA dates its Dance (I) to early 1909 and identifies it as the composition Matisse made rapidly while planning the decorative project.^[2][3]

The number and subjects of panels were not fixed from the first discussion. The Art Institute of Chicago's research traces Matisse's idea for a broader stairway sequence that involved dancing, music and repose or bathers. Its scholarly account separates that artist's proposal from the final agreement. In a letter dated 31 March 1909, Shchukin ordered two panels and specifically requested music as the second subject, connecting it to the concerts in his house. The completed pair was therefore Dance and Music. Matisse continued developing a bathers painting for himself, but it was not a third Shchukin mural installed beside the two commissioned works.^[5][6][7]

Matisse described how he imagined a visitor entering the house and encountering different moods as the staircase rose. His published 1909 account placed the dance at the start of this imagined journey, conveying energy and lightness. That helps explain the painting's upward leaps and expansive circle. It should not, however, be taken as a precise surviving plan of where every final panel hung. The letters establish the two-panel order; the exact first arrangement of the decorations has been reconstructed by scholars with some uncertainty.^[2][5][6]

The size of the commission changed what the picture had to do. A small painting can invite a viewer to examine a face or object from inches away. A stairway decoration has to hold together as people approach it, look up, and move past. Matisse's repeated broad colours and linked figures make the scene graspable at a glance; the changing poses reward a longer look. The final panel is a painting with its own visual logic and an object originally conceived for a particular room.^[1][2][5]

Where was Matisse working as the commission developed?

The Art Institute traces a change of workplace alongside the developing design. Matisse began the large dance idea while based in Paris. During summer 1909, before completing the Shchukin canvases, he worked with his family near the Mediterranean coast at Cavalière-sur-Mer. The Art Institute connects pictures made there to his search for an idyllic setting for dance and music. Such works help place the murals among a wider group of experiments in figures and landscape. They do not prove that a particular tree, cove or model appears in the finished Dance, whose setting has been reduced far beyond a specific coastal view.^[7]

In September Matisse moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux, southwest of Paris, and set up a studio that the Art Institute says was funded by the Shchukin commission. There he resumed the panels. The 1910 Dance can thus be understood as work carried across settings: an early large version in Paris, a summer of related landscape and figure ideas, and sustained work on the commissioned paintings at Issy. This chronology is more informative than imagining one sudden session in which the final red figures appeared fully formed. It also explains why the new studio later became a place where the earlier Dance (I) remained visible, even after the second canvas went to Moscow.^[6][7][8]

The location does not answer every technical question. The Art Institute notes that detailed physical examinations of Dance and Music were not available for its study, limiting what can be said about the precise means of moving the composition between large canvases. The documentary sequence and studio photographs support a development from the first version to the commissioned second; they do not identify every mark-making tool or painting stage. That distinction leaves room for future conservation research without denying the visible changes between the two works.^[6]

Where did the dance motif come from?

The ring did not first appear in 1909. In Matisse's 1905–06 Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), a much smaller circle of dancers appears in the distance among other figures in an Arcadian landscape. The Hermitage catalogue identifies that group as a precedent for the later composition. The earlier painting lets us see a motif isolated and enlarged: what had been one episode in a varied scene became the entire subject of a monumental panel.^[2][9]

The change is more than enlargement. The Joy of Life places dancers among reclining people, trees and other activities. The 1910 Dance removes nearly everything except the ring, hill and sky. Its figures are no longer one event within a landscape; their linked movement structures the whole canvas. The viewer's attention cannot drift to neighbouring stories. Matisse converted a background group into an architectural image whose scale and simplicity demand attention.^[2][9]

This connection has firmer evidence than the legacy page's proposed comparison with a William Blake watercolour. A resemblance between dancing figures in two artworks does not prove that Matisse saw or used Blake's image. The Hermitage names Matisse's own earlier painting, and the formal link is visible: a ring of joined bodies transformed across works by the same artist. The Le Bonheur de vivre page provides the fuller setting for that first circle.^[2][9]

The bathers idea belongs to the same period of exploration. The Art Institute's Bathers by a River began in relation to the 1909 commission but followed a separate, long path of changes into 1917. Its early state was pastoral and close to Matisse's proposed subject of repose; later campaigns made it far more austere. It is useful evidence that Shchukin's commission generated more than one visual problem, but its eventual appearance must not be projected back onto the dance panel of 1910.^[6][7]

What changed between Dance (I) and the finished panel?

The two versions share five figures, a wide format, a hill, a blue field and the near-complete ring. MoMA calls Dance (I) a compositional study, and its pale bodies and relatively loose marks make it visibly different from the Hermitage panel's saturated red-orange figures. The later painting has a stronger colour division and a more forceful effect at a distance. Yet the first is not simply an otherwise identical image in a lighter palette. The poses, relationships between bodies and painted handling changed as Matisse worked toward the commissioned version.^[1][2][3]

The first canvas is almost as large as the second, so Matisse could test the group at the scale Shchukin's wall required. Looking at it as a full-size working painting changes the word “study.” It was not merely a small diagram of where five dots should go. Its arms, legs and spaces had to work across nearly four metres. MoMA notes that the early canvas drew criticism for its simplified bodies and lack of conventional perspective, while Matisse valued the life and rhythm he found in the design. What others saw as unfinished or crude was also a deliberate way to make movement direct.^[3]

The Art Institute's technical scholarship is careful about the next step. It documents Matisse starting on the commissioned panel after the earlier canvas, but says the exact method of transfer is unknown without technical examination of the Hermitage works. It suggests possibilities rather than proving a grid, tracing or mechanical enlargement. The public story should therefore remain at the level the evidence permits: Matisse developed a first full-size composition and then painted a second, revised, more intense canvas for Shchukin.^[6]

We also know the first canvas continued to have a life of its own. Matisse retained it, and in 1912 painted a view of his Issy studio titled Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” I, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The earlier dance fills the background of that studio picture after the completed Shchukin panel had gone to Moscow. The Met's account also notes that Matisse showed the first version publicly in London and at the 1913 Armory Show. A painting used in a commission's development could still be kept, displayed and revisited as an artwork in its own right.^[3][8]

This distinction matters for a reader choosing what to look at. MoMA's pale-pink Dance (I) offers a record of an emerging solution. The Hermitage's red Dance is the commissioned panel whose final colour and bodily tension belong to the staircase pair. Neither should be captioned with the other's dimensions, collection, date or provenance. The two versions share a design problem; they are not the same physical canvas photographed in different light.^[1][2][3]

What does Music add to the pair?

The companion Music (1910) is similarly vast and uses a related red-orange, green and blue scheme. It places five figures across a hill, including a standing violinist and a seated pipe player. But its bodies are separated. Rather than tugging one another into a ring, they seem individually absorbed in playing, singing or listening. The Hermitage draws the contrast directly: Music is comparatively still, while Dance is dynamic. Paired on the staircase, the two works could turn movement and concentration into complementary experiences.^[2][10]

The comparison becomes clearer if we look at what connects people in each picture. In Dance, joined hands carry force from one body to the next. Even the near-gap at the bottom registers because the ring depends on contact. In Music, colour, ground and listening connect bodies that remain physically apart. The two panels use similar economy, but they do not treat all collective activity alike. Matisse made dance visible through circulation and music visible through intervals and stillness.^[2][10]

Shchukin's concerts give the musical subject a connection to the life of the house, while dance supplies an energetic entrance to Matisse's imagined programme. Still, neither canvas is a report on an evening in the collector's rooms. The dancers have no named partners or costume, and the musicians have no identified score. Their simplified world belongs to the decorative vision of the commission, not to documentary illustration. That common ambition helps the different actions hold together as a pair.^[5][10]

How did viewers and Shchukin respond in 1910?

Before travelling to Moscow, Dance and Music were shown at the 1910 Salon d'Automne in Paris. The panels drew a hostile response from some critics and visitors. Kostenevich's study of the Shchukin collection records that the collector briefly drew back from accepting the works amid the controversy, then reversed that decision. Both went to his house. This sequence is more revealing than a simple claim that he either loved or rejected them from the outset: the paintings tested even a patron who had actively supported Matisse.^[5]

The reaction concerned the very properties that now make the panel unmistakable. The figures are huge, nude and simplified; the colours do not soften into conventional flesh and atmospheric distance. A person expecting academic anatomy or a narrative scene might have found the work confrontational. We can acknowledge that response without treating it as proof that the bodies were carelessly painted. MoMA's account of the related 1909 version shows Matisse himself understood the reduction of detail as a way to make rhythm and life direct.^[3][5]

The finished work reached the setting for which it had been made. The Hermitage places the pair on Shchukin's Moscow staircase, and its provenance traces Dance in his collection from 1910. It then passed through the Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow and entered the Hermitage in 1948. The Shchukin Collection Archive supplies the intervening nationalisation date of 5 November 1918. These records explain why a French painting made for a private Russian house is now a public museum work in St Petersburg.^[1][2][11]

Its move also changed the conditions of looking. A visitor on a staircase would meet the picture while walking and would encounter Music in the same decorative programme. A museum visitor can stop before a single object and compare it with reproductions of other versions. Both experiences are legitimate, but the original architectural purpose helps explain the mural's scale and its bold, quickly legible design. The museum catalogue anchors the object through its size and inventory even when different reproductions vary in crop and colour.^[1][2]

What can we know about the first installation?

The stairway setting is documented; a fully certain reconstruction of every sightline is harder. Kostenevich examines the shape and narrowness of the Shchukin house and suggests that only two enormous panels could be placed satisfactorily. This helps make sense of why Matisse's broader three-part conception became a two-panel installation. Yet the study's proposed exact arrangement depends on interpretation of architectural evidence and correspondence whose surviving record is incomplete. The painting's public account should therefore say that Dance and Music were made for and hung in the Moscow house, while avoiding a claim that we can place each centimetre of their original position from the present evidence.^[2][5]

That uncertainty does not weaken the importance of the site. The sheer width of Dance would have occupied a substantial part of any landing wall. Its figures were made to be encountered as bodies roughly on the scale of people moving through the house, although they were not portraits of those people. The red chain could be taken in from a distance and then followed in parts as the viewer approached. Music offered another large field with bodies spread apart. The exchange between a circling group and a quiet group would remain meaningful even if our map of the first hanging is incomplete.^[1][2][5]

It is also easy to mistake later museum display for evidence of what the 1910 patron first saw. Museums can place the two paintings together and label their commission clearly, but their walls, lighting and viewing distance differ from Shchukin's house. A reproduction removes even more of that setting. The secure historical claim is about the commission and the pair; the formal claim comes from the paintings themselves. Keeping those distinct lets us use the original site to understand the work without building an invented tour of the collector's home.^[1][2][5]

Is the Barnes Foundation mural another version?

Matisse returned to dance when Albert C. Barnes commissioned a mural for his gallery more than twenty years later. The Barnes Foundation's The Dance was made for an exact architectural site: spaces above three doors and beneath curved ceiling arches. The museum dates the final work to 1932–33 and describes three separate canvases fitted to those shapes. Its elongated, tumbling figures respond to openings and arches in a way that the rectangular Shchukin panel does not.^[4]

The recurrence of the subject does show a lasting interest. In 1910 Matisse arranged five linked bodies in an open-air ring over a hill. For Barnes he had to address a much more irregular wall space and devised a different visual movement. The later mural should not be called a third state of the same Shchukin commission. It had a different patron, date, location, planning process and physical structure. The shared title is an invitation to compare how Matisse answered different rooms, not a reason to collapse their histories.^[1][4]