Dance (La Danse)
Dance is one of Matisse's most exuberant and liberated compositions -- five coral-pink figures circling in a ring against a stark blue-green background, evoking joy, freedom, and primal rhythm.
Dance (1909-1910) was commissioned by Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin as part of a pair of decorative panels for his Moscow mansion. Its companion piece, Music, was hung alongside it on the staircase.
The painting is radical in its simplicity. Matisse reduced the composition to three elements: the warm coral-pink of the dancing figures, the deep blue of the sky, and the green of the earth. There is no background detail, no shadow, no spatial depth -- only pure color and movement.
The five nude figures join hands in a circle, one figure reaching toward another who is just out of grasp -- creating a sense of dynamic tension within the ecstatic circling. The flat forms and intense color anticipate much of what would come in 20th-century abstraction.