Dance (La Danse) is a painting made by Henri Matisse in 1910, at the request of Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, who bequeathed the large decorative panel to the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg. The composition of dancing figures is commonly recognized as "a key point of (Matisse's) career and in the development of modern painting".[1] A preliminary version of the work, sketched by Matisse in 1909 as a study for the work, resides at MoMA in New York, where it has been labeled Dance (I).
In March 1909, Matisse painted a preliminary version of this work, known as Dance (I).[3] It was a compositional study and uses paler colors and less detail.[4] The painting was highly regarded by the artist who once called it "the overpowering climax of luminosity"; it is also featured in the background of Matisse's Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance I", (1912).
Dance is a large decorative panel, painted with a companion piece, Music, specifically for the Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, with whom Matisse had a long association. Until the October Revolution of 1917, this painting hung together with Music on the staircase of Shchukin's Moscow mansion.[5]
The painting shows five dancing figures, painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green landscape and deep blue sky. It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art, and uses a classic Fauvist color palette: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. The painting is often associated with the "Dance of the Young Girls" from Igor Stravinsky's famous 1913 musical work The Rite of Spring. The composition or arrangement of dancing figures is reminiscent of Blake's watercolour "Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing" from 1786.[6]
Dance is commonly recognized as "a key point of (Matisse's) career and in the development of modern painting".[7] It resides in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It was loaned to H'ART Museum for a period of six weeks from April 1 to May 9, 2010.[8]
The French art periodical Verve published a lithographic version of the Hermitage La Danse in its Volume 1, Issue 4, January–March 1939. On page 50 of this issue, it is stated: "Henri Matisse has painted for Verve a replica of his large painting, La Danse . . .. This is reproduced lithographically on the following pages [book-ended by two linocuts of skaters in motion]." The lithography was carried out by Mourlot Freres (Paris). This lithographic version is, with margins, 14" × 25" and therefore much smaller than the painted versions. The lithographic version is hardly a "replica" of the Hermitage version, as several differences can be readily observed:
(1) the green area in the lithographic version is a lime green.
(2) the sky is virtually black (but with some blue near borders and edges of figures),
(3) color areas are internally uniform, eschewing any painterly effects,
(4) the lines in the figures are thicker, giving the image - with its uniform color areas – somewhat the appearance of a woodcut, and
(5) the entire image is surrounded by a "frame" consisting of flat yellow, blue, and black color areas. The entire lithograph has the look of a genre that Matisse invented in the late 1930s, namely, the colored-paper cut-out and lithographic versions thereof.
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
The Blue Nudes is a series of collages, and related color lithographs, by Henri Matisse, made from paper cut-outs depicting nude figures in various positions. Restricted by his physical condition after his surgery for stomach cancer, Matisse began creating art by cutting and painting sheets of paper by hand; these Matisse viewed as independent artworks in their own right. The Blue Nudes refers also to the editioned multiples based on the cut-outs. Matisse supervised the creation of these lithographs until his death in 1954.
The Conversation, a painting by Henri Matisse dating from 1908 to 1912, depicts the artist and his wife facing each other before a background of intense blue. It is in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The Dessert: Harmony in Red is a painting by Henri Matisse. Previously titled Harmony in Blue, the painting had a blue background when Matisse first exhibited it in 1908. In 1909, Matisse changed the blue to red, retitling it The Dessert: Harmony in Red.
Le bonheur de vivre is a painting by Henri Matisse. Along with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Le bonheur de vivre is regarded as one of the pillars of early modernism. The monumental canvas was first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants of 1906, where its cadmium colors and spatial distortions caused a public expression of protest and outrage.
The Red Studio is an oil on canvas painting by French artist Henri Matisse from 1911. It is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
View of Collioure is a 1905 oil-on-canvas painting by Henri Matisse. It is an example of the style that Matisse employed during his early period of Fauvism. The painting has been in the collection of The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia since 1948. It was originally part of the Sergei Shchukin collection, and then was at the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow.
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and traditional modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.
Window at Tangier; also referred to as La Fenêtre à Tanger, Paysage vu d'une fenêtre, and Landscape viewed from a window, Tangiers, is a painting by Henri Matisse, executed in 1912. It is held at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Fauvism is a style of painting and an art movement that emerged in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the style of les Fauves, a group of modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1904 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1905–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were André Derain and Henri Matisse.
Game of Bowls is a 1908 painting by the French artist Henri Matisse. The painting shows three young men, probably Matisse's sons and nephew, playing a game of boules. Matisse sees the game as a manifestation of man's creativity, and an instrument to use in understanding the codes of life. The painting is part of Matisse's series on man's "Golden Age" and was part of Sergei Shchukin's collection before the October Revolution of 1917. It is now in the collection of The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Music is a wall-size painting made by Henri Matisse in 1910. The painting was commissioned by Sergei Shchukin, who hung it with Matisse's 1910 Dance on the staircase of his Moscow mansion. Matisse made the painting without any preparatory sketches, and thus the painting bears many traces of modifications. One can virtually trace the steps Matisse took to find the intended effect. As in Dance, the aim was to show man's attainment of a state of completeness by immersion in creativity.
Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin was a Russian businessman who became an art collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century, this period is characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
Pyotr Ivanovich Shchukin was an art collector who built an important collection of Russian ancient art and artifacts and owned several impressionist masterpieces.
Ivan Vassilievitch Shchukin (1818-1890) was a Moscow merchant in the textile trade whose company, I.V. Shchukin and Sons, became one of the largest textile businesses in Russia. Several of his sons formed important art collections around the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries.
Bathers by a River, also known as Bathers at the River and occasionally referred to as simply Bathers, is a large 1917 oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Henri Matisse. Matisse began painting the canvas in 1909 and finished the painting in the fall of 1917, making it one of three pictures he painted during the Battle of Verdun.
Goldfish is an oil-on-canvas still life painting by French visual artist Henri Matisse. Painted in 1912, Goldfish was part of a series that Matisse produced between the spring and early summer of 1912.
Arab Coffeehouse, is an oil-on-canvas painting by French visual artist Henri Matisse. Produced in 1913, Arab Coffeehouse was part of a series of goldfish paintings that Matisse produced in the 1910s and 1920s.
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