Description

Matisse painted this second version of the Dance in 1910. Dance, together with Music, was commissioned by S.I.Shchukin to decorate the staircase in his Moscow mansion. Matisse took the motif of the round dance, used as a symbol back as far as French Renaissance, to represent the rhythm and expression of the 20th century. Dance, Matisse once said, meant "life and rhythm."

Such broadly conceived themes ideally suited Matisse; they allowed him freedom of invention and play of form and expression. His images of dancers, and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Source

The Dance is one of the few wholly convincing images of physical ecstasy made in the twentieth century. Matisse is said to have got the idea for it in Collioure in 1905, watching some fishermen and peasants on the beach in a circular dance called a sardana. But the sardana is a stately measure, and The Dance is more intense. That circle of stamping and twisting takes you back down the line, to the red-figure vases of Mediterranean antiquity and, beyond them, to the caves. It tries to represent motions as ancient as dance itself. Source