Here are twelve famous dance paintings, counted down from Munch's The Dance of Life, 1899 to 1900, to Botticelli's Primavera, about 1480. Each holds a moving body still.
In Laocoön, a 1766 essay named after an ancient statue, the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing told painters to choose the moment that lets the viewer guess what came before and what comes next. The best dance paintings catch the top of a step, or the pause between two.
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How These Were Chosen
The list keeps to painting alone, so photographs, sculpture and film were left out. Within it, every picture passes one of three tests.
The dance stands for something larger, like love, the seasons or time. Or it happens in a real hall or at a real festival that can still be found on a map. Or the steps, the music or the rules are clear enough to name the dance itself.
12. Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life (1899 to 1900)
A man and a woman in a long red dress dance together on a strip of grass by the water. Behind them, other couples turn near the shore. Above the sea hangs a pale moon, and its reflection runs down the water toward the beach as one long upright stripe of light.
The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch worked on this canvas through 1899 and 1900. The setting is Åsgårdstrand, a small seaside town where he kept a summer house, on the long inlet of the sea that leads to Oslo. It is a midsummer night, and no particular dance is named. Couples simply pair off on the grass, in the open air.
The foreground is shared by three women. On the left, the youngest stands alone in a white dress and smiles. In the center, the woman in red is dancing, held close by her partner. On the right, an older woman in black stands apart with a somber face.
Many viewers take the three as one life told in colors: youth in white, passion in red, mourning and old age in black. Only the middle stage is dancing. The girl in white on the left is still waiting, smiling, and has not yet joined the couples on the grass.
Biographers have also put names on the figures, though Munch himself never did. The dancing man is usually read as the painter. The woman in red is often taken for Milly Thaulow, a married woman with whom the young Munch had an affair in Åsgårdstrand.
The same writers find Tulla Larsen, Munch's lover from around 1898 to 1902, in two places at once: smiling in white on the left, and somber in black on the right. Their relationship was stormy, and he was in the middle of it while he painted.
The three ages of a woman were not new to him. An earlier picture, Woman in Three Stages, had already set them side by side. The Dance of Life moves that idea onto a dance floor, with a partner and a crowd.
Munch then placed it in the Frieze of Life, a series of paintings about love, anxiety and death that he showed together, hung in a long band like the frieze of a room. The Scream is part of it, and the stripe of moonlight from this shore comes back in other canvases, among them one simply titled Moonlight.
At a Glance
Artist: Edvard Munch (1863 to 1944)
Painted: 1899 to 1900
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum), Oslo
About This Painting
How big is The Dance of Life?
The Dance of Life measures 125 by 191 centimeters, about 49 by 75 inches.
Was it always called The Dance of Life?
No. The Dance of Life was first shown in Dresden in 1900 as Johannisnacht, German for Saint John's Night. It took its present title when Munch exhibited it in Kristiania, the old name of Oslo, in 1904.
Why does The Dance of Life carry two dates?
Munch signed The Dance of Life twice. One signature, at lower left, is dated 1899. The other, at upper right, is dated 1900.
How did The Dance of Life reach the Nasjonalmuseet?
The Norwegian collector Olaf Schou bought The Dance of Life and gave it to the museum in 1910.
11. Henri Matisse, Dance (1910)
Five nude figures, painted brick red, dance in a ring on a green hill under a blue sky. Henri Matisse made this version in 1910 for Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow collector who had built his fortune in the textile trade.
In 1909 Shchukin ordered two huge panels from Matisse, Dance and Music, to hang on the staircase of his Moscow mansion, the Trubetskoy Palace.
Before they traveled to Russia, the panels went on show in Paris, and what happened there almost kept them out of Shchukin's house.