Henri Matisse's Dance and the Four Decades It Kept Changing

Feature image: Henri Matisse, Baigneuses à la rivière (Bathers by a River), 1909–1917. © Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York via Art Institute of Chicago

The ring dance is one of the oldest images in art, a chain of joined hands that painters and potters from ancient Greece through the Renaissance used to picture harmony, festivity, and ecstatic release. In 1909, Henri Matisse stripped that image down to five bodies, three colors, and a single looping line of motion, and the result became one of the founding pictures of modern painting. Matisse's Dance then kept moving. Between a small background detail painted in 1905 and the paper cut-outs of his final decade, the motif passed through a full-scale oil sketch, a commissioned canvas for a Moscow staircase, a three-part mural that he started once, finished twice, and installed only once, a ballet curtain, and the first plates of an illustrated book. Each version of Matisse's Dance arrives at a turning point in his career, and following the circle from one to the next tracks his path from Fauvism to the scissors.

Matisse's Dance began as a small passage in The Joy of Life, 1905-06, first shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. Far in the background of that crowded pastoral, six nude figures circle with their hands linked, and the group already carries the motif's essential structure, a closed ring of bodies against open color. The Joy of Life marked Matisse's move beyond the broken brushwork of Fauvism toward large flat areas of color and long, continuous contour, and the ring of dancers was the most concentrated expression of that shift. Over the next three years, he isolated the group, reduced it to five figures, and enlarged it until a background detail could carry an entire wall. The painting now hangs at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the institution that would commission the motif's largest version a quarter century later.

In March 1909, Matisse showed the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin a full-scale canvas of the dance, painted rapidly in thin washes in his Paris studio, and it won him a commission for two decorative panels for the staircase of Shchukin's mansion, Dance and Music. The canvas, now known as Dance (I), functioned as a compositional study, though its scale made it a complete statement in its own right. It was the first time Matisse applied the radical simplification of his Fauve years to a painting meant to work as architecture, and his decision to treat a wall as a single field of flat color set the direction of his decorative work for the rest of his life.

Matisse kept Dance (I) in his studio for decades and repeatedly painted it into his own interiors, including Henri Matisse, Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance" I, 1912, where the left half of the canvas fills the background behind an armchair and a stand of flowers. That picture traveled to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912 and the Armory Show in New York in 1913, so the motif reached its first international audiences as a painting within a painting. The studio interiors also became a subject in their own right, a way for Matisse to use his finished work as a flat, decorative backdrop and to collapse the space of a room into a single plane of color. Dance (I) left the studio in 1936, passed through private American collections, and entered the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, where it has remained a centerpiece of the collection.

The final canvas for Moscow, painted at Issy-les-Moulineaux through 1909 and 1910, keeps the composition of the first version almost exactly and transforms its effect. Matisse later described dance as "life and rhythm," and he connected the picture to the farandole he had watched at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, though he also credited a Catalan ring dance he had seen at Collioure, and the two accounts remain unresolved. The real development between 1909 and 1910 was intensity. The airy, tentative study became a canvas of saturated color and heavy contour, turning a lighthearted subject into an image of collective, almost ritual energy, and the result became a landmark of early modern color.

Dance I and Dance II share the same composition almost figure for figure. Both canvases set five nude dancers in a ring across three bands of color, a green hill, a blue sky, and the bodies that span them, and both strip away shadow, horizon detail, and perspective so the surface reads as one flat decorative field. In both, the hill rises in a single curve that pushes the dancers against the edges of the canvas, making the ring seem larger than its frame, and in both the circle breaks at the front, where two dancers reach toward each other and their hands fail to meet. That gap drives each picture, the point where the ring opens toward the viewer and the motion seems about to close again.

The two paintings part ways in color. Dance I was painted quickly in thin washes, with pale pink bodies, a light blue sky, and a soft green hill, and it reads as an airy, joyful study. Dance II pushes each color to full saturation, turning the bodies a deep brick red against ultramarine and emerald, so that the three colors meet edge to edge at nearly equal intensity and no area recedes. The change turns a light, open composition into a dense wall of color built to hold its own on a grand staircase.

Line carries the second difference. In Dance I, the figures are drawn with light, loose contours and move with an easy, almost weightless spring. In Dance II, Matisse darkened and thickened the contours and added heavier lines at the knees, shoulders, and spines, so the dancers become muscular and straining, their heads bowed and backs arched, and the leftmost figure leans so far forward that the whole ring seems to spin. Dance I suggests play, and Dance II suggests ritual, a collective, almost frenzied energy drawn from the same arrangement of bodies.

Together, the two versions show Matisse discovering how far color and line alone could carry a picture. Dance I proved that a monumental canvas could be built from a few flat colors and simplified bodies, a simplification critics at the time attacked as inept or deliberately crude. Dance II took that same structure and charged it with intensity, turning a study into a finished decorative panel and one of the most recognized images of early modern painting. Dance I became the version Matisse kept and returned to in his studio. Dance II became the public face of the motif, and between them they set the terms for every later return to the dance, from the Barnes mural to the cut-outs.

Matisse exhibited Dance II and Music at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in the fall of 1910, where critics attacked their simplified bodies and flat color, and Shchukin briefly hesitated before shipping both canvases to Moscow that December. Once installed, the panels were among the most radical paintings Russian artists could see firsthand. Shchukin opened his house to visitors, and the young Moscow avant-garde studied his Matisses closely in the years before the First World War, absorbing the lesson that color and flat shape could carry a painting on their own.

That influence outlasted the collection's original setting. Shchukin's collection was nationalized in 1918 and merged into Moscow's State Museum of New Western Art, and when that museum was dissolved in 1948, Dance and Music went to the Hermitage in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, where they remain. The 1910 canvas has since become the most widely reproduced version of Matisse's Dance, and its red figures against blue and green now stand as shorthand for his contribution to modern art, the conviction that color itself could be the subject of a painting.

Twenty years after the Moscow commission, in 1930, the American collector Albert C. Barnes asked Matisse to fill three arched lunettes above the windows of his gallery in Merion, Pennsylvania, and Matisse chose the dance again. The commission arrived when he was restless with easel painting, and the scale of the wall forced a new approach. Working in a rented garage in Nice, he drew directly on three huge canvases with charcoal fixed to a long bamboo pole, then abandoned that first attempt as too decorative. The canvases resurfaced in his Nice studio in 1990, and Henri Matisse, The Unfinished Dance, 1931, now hangs at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

The second version produced the most important development in the motif's history. To rearrange figures at that scale, Matisse painted sheets of paper, cut them into shapes, and pinned them to the canvas, a method that let him adjust a limb or a torso in minutes. The dancers that emerged break apart the closed circle of 1910, tumbling and lunging across the three arches and cropped by the curves of the lunettes, and Matisse described the result as a war dance. A measurement error meant this version could never fit Merion, and Henri Matisse, The Paris Dance, 1931-33, stayed in France beside the unfinished canvases at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Matisse started again with corrected dimensions, and Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1932-33, was installed in Merion in May 1933 in blue, black, pink, and pearl gray. The Centre Pompidou describes this final version as Dionysian, in contrast to the combative Paris version, and Matisse wrote that its splendour was impossible to imagine without seeing it in place. The project gave him a new working method and a new sense of scale, and the Barnes Foundation describes it as a creative reboot for his career. The mural moved with the collection to Philadelphia in 2012, where it was reinstalled in a replica of the original gallery.

The pinned paper of the Barnes mural soon moved to the stage. When the choreographer Léonide Massine asked Matisse in 1937 to design Rouge et Noir, which the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo premiered in 1939, Matisse planned the curtain in cut paper, and Henri Matisse, Two Dancers, 1937-38, still carries the thumbtacks that held its shapes in place. Its leaping figures echo the Barnes dancers, and the project confirmed for Matisse that cut paper could stand as a finished design in its own right.

The ballet studies led directly to the cut-outs. The first two plates of Matisse's illustrated book Jazz, published in 1947, began as studies for the ballet, and the book's floating acrobats carry the dancers of the Barnes mural into open space with no architecture to contain them. By 1950, the dance had become a single figure in Henri Matisse, Creole Dancer, 1950, whose limbs break into flat, jagged shapes against a field of colored rectangles. The motif that began as six small figures in a painted landscape now existed entirely as cut color.

By 1952, Matisse was composing whole walls in cut paper, and works like The Sorrows of the King (1952) turned the method first tested on the Barnes canvases into the dominant form of his last years. The discovery of these cut-outs by young American and European artists in the 1950s helped open a path toward pure form and abstraction, carrying Matisse's Dance well beyond its own subject. The ring of dancers from 1905 became a method, and the method outlived him, reaching painters who never saw the Moscow staircase or the Merion lunettes.

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