Author
Henri Matisse
Movement / period
Modernism
Medium
painting
Location
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
When Shchukin hung the painting in his Moscow mansion, he was so spooked by the nudity that he briefly considered hiding it — instead he placed a sign outside warning guests what they were about to see.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- Matisse actually painted two versions of Dance — the first, now in MoMA, was a study done in 1909; the monumental final version measuring 260 × 391 cm went to Russian collector Sergei Shchukin in 1910 for around 15,000 francs.
- When Shchukin hung the painting in his Moscow mansion, he was so spooked by the nudity that he briefly considered hiding it — instead he placed a sign outside warning guests what they were about to see.
- After the Russian Revolution, Shchukin's entire collection was nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1918; Dance ended up in the Hermitage and Shchukin never got a single franc back.
- The five dancers are based on a circle dance Matisse spotted at a bal musette in Paris — it was a popular accordion-driven working-class dance called the farandole, not some ancient Greek ritual as art historians once assumed.
- X-ray analysis of the canvas revealed that one of the dancer's hands originally gripped the wrist of the figure beside her — Matisse changed it to the barely-touching fingers we see now, creating that electric gap of tension at the top of the circle.
- The almost aggressive simplicity — no shadows, no depth, only three colors — was a direct provocation: Matisse was answering Picasso, whose proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon had caused a scandal just three years earlier in 1907.
More details A circle dance Matisse spotted on a beach in Collioure scandalized Paris, then settled at the Hermitage.
What you're looking at
Five bodies on one long breath
The canvas measures 260 by 391 centimetres — less a framed picture than a slab of wall. Its height is roughly a doorway plus half a metre, and in the reception hall of Shchukin's mansion it really did reach almost to the ceiling. Five nearly life-size figures move along the crest of a green hill under a flat, airless blue sky. Their feet barely touch the line of the hill, there's no shadow beneath them at all, and the dance reads more like flight than walking. They hold hands, but the ring never quite closes: at the lower left two figures reach for each other and their fingertips stop a few centimetres short. Historians keep coming back to that gap, comparing it to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where God's finger reaches for Adam's and never touches it either.
No two poses repeat. The figure on the right crouches and seems to drag the others forward; her neighbour arches so far back that only the crown of her head shows; a third throws her arms overhead as if losing her balance. On the left the ring is held shut by figures planted on wide, sturdy legs; on the right it's held by bodies almost skipping forward, and that contrast between grounded and lunging keeps the eye moving. There is no shading, no anatomy to speak of — just outline, the bodies cut out like paper silhouettes, which is exactly why the dance reads instantly from across a room. The landscape carries no extra detail at all, no tree, no flower, no stone, just the line where hill meets sky. The panel was designed for a wall above a staircase, to be seen from below, which explains the oversized stride and the poster-flat line.
How it was made
One subject, two canvases, and a shifted foot
Sergei Shchukin placed the commission in March 1909, when Matisse was just past forty and Shchukin's money — among the first genuinely large sums he'd been paid for a monumental work — meant more to him than mere recognition. Matisse didn't start with red: the first canvas, almost exactly the same size at 259.7 by 390.1 centimetres, he painted in Paris, in his studio on the Boulevard des Invalides, in washed-out pinks and blues. The near-exact match in size is no accident: Matisse kept the proportions and scale of the composition and changed only the colour and the degree of finish. X-rays of that earlier canvas, now in New York, show he originally painted six dancers and later painted one out, leaving five — the number that stuck. Its companion, Music, he painted far more directly, by most accounts with almost no preparatory studies; Dance, by contrast, went through two full-size canvases and, the X-rays suggest, a reshuffling of figures even during work on the final version.
That same year Matisse moved to a new house with a studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux outside Paris and worked on both panels at once, alternating between Dance and Music so their colours would stay in step. X-radiography and infrared imaging of the Hermitage canvas show that late in the process he shifted the whole composition to the right — which is why faint outlines of "extra" feet and shins still show through the final paint layer. The finished panel went on public view on 1 October 1910, at the Salon d'Automne in Paris's Grand Palais, alongside Music.
Where the images came from
From a beach in Collioure to a room in the Hermitage
Matisse first saw this particular ring not in a studio but on a beach. In the summer of 1905, in Collioure, a fishing town on France's Mediterranean coast, he watched locals dance the sardana, a Catalan circle dance open to any number of people, children and old men alike. The image stayed with him and resurfaced in the background of Joy of Life (1905-06), where a small ring of dancers is barely visible among the trees. Joy of Life had its own scandal waiting, at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants — critics were no less outraged than they would be by Dance four years later, so the Paris uproar of 1910 was not entirely new to Matisse. The painting was bought in 1906 by the Paris collector Leo Stein; today it hangs at the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia, the same institution for which, a quarter-century later, Matisse would paint the same ring of dancers across a wall all over again. Three years after Joy of Life, he lifted that one detail out of the larger scene and blew it up to the size of a wall, making it the whole subject.
In doing so he was arguing with his contemporaries. Where Munch's The Scream poured anxiety into wrenched, howling colour, and Klimt's The Kiss buried an embrace under gold and ornament, Matisse went the other way — stripped out the ornament, stripped out the psychology, and left only outline and three flat fields of colour. What mattered more to him than Vienna's patterning or the North's dread were Cézanne's bathers, which he had studied for over a decade. One small Cézanne, Three Bathers, Matisse bought back in 1899, when he himself had almost no money, and kept it his whole life, calling it his talisman; the same interest in the generalised, almost sculptural body shows through in the figures of Dance.
What happened to it next
From a Moscow mansion to the Hermitage
As long as Shchukin was alive, Dance and Music hung on the staircase of his Moscow mansion at 8 Bolshoy Znamensky Lane. Shchukin himself had already emigrated with his family, first to Germany and then to France, in August 1918, and never returned to Moscow before his death in Paris in 1936. The collection was nationalised that same year: the mansion became home to the First Museum of New Western Painting, 256 paintings and drawings, including both Matisse panels. A few years later the collection was absorbed into the State Museum of New Western Art, formed in 1923 out of the Shchukin and Morozov collections; the two panels spent nearly a quarter-century there.
In 1948, in the middle of a postwar campaign against "formalism," the museum was shut down — official paperwork branded it a breeding ground for cringing before decadent bourgeois culture — and its holdings were split between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad. The two panels were kept together: both Dance and Music went to the Hermitage, where they still hang, no longer over a staircase but in a room of their own, facing each other. They survived the twentieth century intact: in 1941, just before the siege of Leningrad began, both paintings were evacuated along with the rest of the Hermitage's collection to Sverdlovsk and weren't brought back until 1945, undamaged. More recently, in 2022, the panels briefly moved to another Hermitage building, the Manège of the Small Hermitage, for an exhibition on the Shchukin collection, then returned that December to the General Staff Building, where they were rehung in a new, more ceremonial arrangement next to works by Picasso.
Its afterlife
A ring that's still being danced
Dance found an unlikely sparring partner just fifteen years on. In 1912 Matisse painted Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance," a still life with the earlier pink version of the ring visible in the background; Picasso saw it, and many historians think it resurfaces in his Three Dancers of 1925. There the same motif of linked bodies is wrenched into something closer to torture — Picasso painted it during a personal crisis, and none of Matisse's calm survives, though the pose is instantly recognisable.
Matisse never let the motif go. Between 1930 and 1933 he took on a vast mural on the same theme for the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, and a measuring error forced him to redo it three times: the first, abandoned version and the second, also rejected, now hang in the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, while the final, third version was installed at Merion in April 1933. It was on this project that Matisse first began pinning shapes cut from coloured paper — grey, blue, pink, black — onto the canvas so he could rearrange the whole composition quickly; art historians see that working method as the direct ancestor of the cut-paper gouaches he kept making until his death in 1954. The image from that room in Saint Petersburg has become something like dance's default picture: it turns up more than any other painting in material for International Dance Day, on 29 April. And when Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with its "Dance of the Young Girls," caused its own uproar in Paris three years later, critics noticed the resemblance almost immediately — even though Matisse's canvas had already been hanging in Moscow for years.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution site State Hermitage Museum
Visual context
