The Dance means joy and movement. Five nude figures circle in a ring, red against a deep blue sky and a green hill, and Matisse said the picture evoked "life and rhythm." He painted it in 1910 for the staircase of a Moscow mansion, and it hangs today in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.
Matisse kept the subject simple enough to be grasped at once. The canvas measures 260 by 391 centimeters, and anyone climbing the staircase took in the whole ring in a single look.
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The nude dancers gave the man who ordered the painting a good deal of trouble.
Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant, had commissioned the panel for the staircase of his house. Then, in October 1910, he stood in front of the finished canvas at the Salon d'Automne, the yearly Paris exhibition where it was first shown, and he hesitated.
The reason he gave had nothing to do with painting. He had recently adopted daughters, and nudes on the staircase of a house with children seemed improper to him.
The pale first version
Before the final canvas there was a paler one, painted in the winter of 1909 as a study for the commission. It is the canvas now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, known as Dance (I).
Its dancers are pale pink and black against a blue sky and a green ground. The red of the Hermitage canvas came later. Matisse never considered this first version more than a preparatory sketch, even though it was full scale and in oil.
The deal was made in person. Shchukin and Matisse lunched at Larue's, a Paris restaurant, in early 1909 and argued about the price. A letter followed from Moscow, dated March 31, 1909, in which Shchukin called the Dance panel "of such nobility" that he was "resolved to brave our bourgeois opinion." He asked for a second panel on the theme of music: "In my house, there is a great deal of music."
The study stayed with Matisse. It lay rolled up in his studio for years, and the ring it showed was older than the commission.
What You'll Discover
Where the ring began.
The gap in the circle.
How Paris took it.
What was painted over in Moscow.