Matisse created Dance (I) as a study for a painting commissioned by the Russian businessman and arts patron Sergei Shchukin. The final work and its pendant painting, Music (both completed in 1910), are housed in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Dance (I) marks a moment in Matisse’s career when he embraced a reductive approach to painting, seeking the expressive potentials of fundamental elements: line, color, and form. This daring approach was influenced by the increasing sophistication of photographic technology. In 1909—the year of this painting—the artist observed, “The painter no longer has to preoccupy himself with details. The photograph is there to render the multitude of details a hundred times better and more quickly. Plastic form will present emotion as directly as possible and by the simplest means.” Indeed, across this monumental canvas Matisse used only four naturalistic colors: blue for the sky, green for the ground, and black and pale pink in rendering the five figures. Although he made adjustments to the composition (as evidenced by the visible underdrawing), Matisse’s final lines convey a remarkable fluidity and sense of dynamic movement in their economical application—in the sweeping curve along the front side of the left figure, for example, and along the outstretched arms of the dancers as they come together in an unhampered expression of joy.
In March 1909, Matisse received a commission from the Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin for two large decorative panels, Dance and Music (now in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). This painting was made quickly as a compositional study for Dance, which was intended to hang on the landing of a staircase, approached from the lower right. This may be why the lower figure leans into the painting, increasing the sense of movement, and why the figure at left is so large, slowing it. Drawing visible beneath the paint shows that Matisse started with two smaller figures where the large figure is now.
Credit: Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Text © MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York