La Danse (I)

Matisse painted this in 1909 for the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who wanted a decorative panel for the staircase of his Moscow mansion. Shchukin had commissioned two large canvases: Music and Dance. When Matisse sent the first version of Dance, Shchukin rejected it. Matisse painted a second version, darker and more resolved, which now hangs in the Hermitage. This first version ended up at MoMA. Five nude figures dance in a circle on a hillside, their hands clasped, their bodies arcing against a flat blue sky and a green earth. The composition is simple: a ring of red-brown bodies against two flat planes of color. The figures are drawn in quick, rough outlines, barely filled in. One figure at the left leans backward, almost falling, pulling the circle taut. Matisse was 40 when he painted this. He had been the leader of the Fauves, the group that used color as an expressive force independent of nature, but by 1909 he was moving toward something more stripped down. He had seen Cezanne's Bathers and was thinking about how to reduce a painting to its essential forms. Dance was his answer: three colors, five bodies, one gesture. The first version is lighter and looser than the Hermitage version. The colors are paler, the brushwork more tentative. Matisse repainted the entire composition for the second version, deepening the blue, saturating the red, tightening the drawing. He told Shchukin that the first version was a study, but it works as a finished painting in its own right, more open and less rhetorical than the version that replaced it. Oil on canvas, 260 by 390 centimeters, nearly 13 feet wide. Matisse painted with thinned oils on a commercially primed canvas, leaving much of the surface flat and unpainted. The figures are drawn with the brush directly, without underdrawing. You can see where he changed his mind: the figure at the lower left was repositioned, and the hand of the falling figure was repainted twice. The strong horizontal format and saturated primary colors make this print work well in a large, modern space with white walls and minimal furniture. The 18x24 size gives the figures enough room to read. A white frame keeps the painting's palette clean. In a smaller room, the 11x14 poster version still carries the composition. The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a gift from Nelson A. Rockefeller. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.