70: The Matisse Room

The Dance
1909 to 1910
Matisse, Henri
The pair of panels known as "The Dance and Music" (also in the
Hermitage) are amongst Matisse's most important - and most famous -
works of the period 1908 to 1913. They were commissioned in 1910 by one
of the leading Russian collectors of French late 19th and early 20th-century
art, Sergey Shchukin. Until the Revolution of 1917, they hung on the
staircase of his Moscow mansion.
Both compositions belong to a group of works united by the theme of "the
golden age" of humanity, and therefore the gures are not real people but
imagined image-symbols.
The sources of Matisse's "The Dance" lie in folk dances, which even today
preserve something of the ritual nature - albeit not always comprehended
today - of pagan times.
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Before this canvas, the theme of the dance passed through several stages
in Matisse's work. Only in this composition of 1910, however, did it acquire
its famous passion and expressive resonance. The frenzy of the pagan
bacchanalia is embodied in the powerful, stunning accord of red, blue and
green, uniting Man, Heaven and Earth.
How rightly has Matisse captured the profound meaning of the dance,
expressing man's suBConscious sense of involvement in the rhythms of
nature and the cosmos! The ve gures have rm outlines, while the
deformation of those gures is an expression of their passionate arousal
and the power of the all-consuming rhythm. The swift, joint movement lls
the bodies with untamed life force and the red becomes a symbol of inner
heat. The gures dance in the deep blue of the Cosmos and the green hill
is charged with the energy of the dancers, sinking beneath their feet and
then springing back.
For all its expressiveness, Matisse's "Dance" has no superuous emotion,
other than that required by the subject. The very organisation of the canvas
ensures that. Instinct and consciousness are united into a harmonious
whole, as we can feel in the balance between centrifugal and centripetal
forces, and in the outlines of the gure on the left, strong and classical in
proportion.



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