Dance (I)

Henri Matisse, 1909 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

You know this Matisse. Five pink naked people dancing on a hill. This is the first version. Technically, it's a sketch. Eight and a half feet tall. Nearly thirteen feet wide. Look at the dancer stretched across the bottom. One leg thrown back. Her whole body reaching toward the woman on the left. Their hands don't quite touch. That's not much of a grip. She's gotta keep moving. Blue sky. Green hill. Five bodies. Hardly a face between them. Nobody had really stripped a painting down this far before. Matisse figured the camera could handle the details now. Painting could go straight for the feeling. He'd watched fishermen do a ring dance on a beach near Spain. Here, the fishermen are gone. So are the beach and the clothes. He painted this in less than a week. A collector from Moscow saw it. Sergei Shchukin. At the end of March, he wrote Matisse that he was ready to "brave our bourgeois opinion" and hang nudes on his staircase. Meaning: fancy people would come over, see five naked dancers on the stairs, and have something to say. He was going to hang them there anyway. So Matisse painted another version. This time the dancers were red. Then the finished paintings went on show in Paris. The critics laid into them. And Shchukin backed out. So much for brave. Then, on the way home, he changed his mind again. The red dancers went to Moscow. They got their staircase. This pink one? Less than a week to paint. It took twenty-seven years for Matisse to let it go.

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