The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Henri Matisse · La Danse · oil on canvas, about 2.6 by 3.9 metres · five dancers in a ring on a hill, in three colours · commissioned in 1909 by Sergei Shchukin for the staircase of his house in Moscow, and dated 1910 · shown with its pair, Music, at the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1910 · State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, since 1948
Mode
Decorative figure painting at mural scale; the round dance as pure motion, without modelling, perspective or story
Mythos
The ring dance at the round of the world; the maenads’ release; humanity on the curve of the earth under an empty sky
Phase
One continuous instant of turning; commissioned in 1909 and dated 1910, after the full-size preparatory canvas of 1909
Presentation
Oil on one canvas about 2.6 by 3.9 metres; five figures larger than life in three flat fields of colour, cut by the edges
Register
One register, warm and ecstatic: vermilion against deep blue over green, with no shadow and no rest
Scale
Five bodies, one hill, one sky
Governing Proposition
Five dancers, nude and larger than life, join hands in a ring on the curve of a green hill under a deep blue sky, painted in three colours and nothing else, and at the front left the reaching hands of two of them do not meet. The wager of the canvas is that a dance can be painted as a force rather than a scene, at the scale once kept for history painting, on a wall a patron had to live with, and that a ring left open at one point is more alive than a ring closed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas hangs in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It is oil on one canvas, about 2.6 metres high and 3.9 wide, half again as wide as it is high. Five nude dancers, hands joined, move in a ring on the curve of a hill. The figures are larger than life, and the edges of the canvas cut them. Three fields of colour carry the whole picture: a red-orange, a vermilion, for the bodies; a green for the hill; a deep blue for the sky. The hair is dark. There is no modelling by light and shade, no cast shadow, no landscape detail, and no space in depth beyond the overlap of the hill and the sky. Nothing else is in the picture.
The ring is an ellipse that tilts toward the viewer at the front and away at the back, so that the circle reads as turning without any one figure caught mid-step. It has two poles. At the left a dancer stands planted and arched back, the head at the very top edge of the canvas. At the front a dancer is flung forward, falling toward an open hand. Between them the motion runs on without a break, through the figures at the back and the right of the ring, and each body is bent by it: limbs drawn longer than limbs are, a leg thrown out past what a leg can do, the whole ring leaning into its own speed.
At the front left the ring is broken. The reaching hands of two dancers do not meet. It is the one place where the painting admits that it could fail. Close the gap and the ring becomes an emblem, a closed wheel, a sign for dancing; leave it open and the circle is something being done, and being done, it can come apart. The figures are cut by the edges, so the ring presses out beyond the canvas on both sides, and the hill is a single curve, ground to push against and nothing more. Five figures, three colours, one hill and one gap: there is almost nothing in the picture that it could lose.
Movement II
In 1908, the year before the commission, Matisse published his Notes d’un peintre, in which he wrote that he dreamed of an art of balance, purity and serenity, and likened such an art to a good armchair. The motif was already in his work: in the background of Le Bonheur de vivre, painted in 1905 and 1906, a small ring of dancers turns in the distance. The Fauve canvases of 1905 had freed colour from the description of things, but at the size of an easel picture. Nothing he had painted yet had risked that freedom on a wall.
In 1909 the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned two large canvases for the staircase of his house, a dance and its pair, Music. In an interview that year Matisse described the scheme as a climb of three floors, with a round dance on a hilltop to meet the visitor at the first. Music is a separate canvas and is not part of this work. The scheme it belongs to bears on this canvas only where the pairing does: the stillness of the musicians answering the turning of the dancers, and a larger order that lives across the commission rather than in the one picture.
What the commission asked of the tradition was its largest format. The large figure painting of Europe had lived by modelling, perspective, local colour, anatomy, finish and a subject. This canvas keeps none of them. In their place stand three flat colours at the scale of history painting, a contour that distorts the limbs for momentum, and a subject that is nothing but motion. It was made for a private house, but for a patron who would have to live with it, and it was shown first in public, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1910, beside Music. Both were received with hostility. The cost of the turn was paid there.
Movement III
A full-size version painted in 1909, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, came first. It was made toward the commission and is not this work, but it is the controlled experiment. The composition is already there, the five figures, the ring, the gap, the three colours. The bodies are a pale flesh pink, the blue is lighter, and the drawing is smoother. The canvas of 1910 raises the bodies to vermilion, deepens the blue and the green, and tightens and roughens the contours, so that the figures are heavier, more angular and more violently in motion. The same composition, in two states, knows two different things. The canvas of 1909 knows something gentler.
Here the form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Model the bodies and they become nudes in a landscape, the ring a scene; add perspective and the hill becomes a place, the dance an event that happened there. What the canvas knows, that the dance is a force and not a scene, lives in the flatness, the three fields, the figures cut by the edges and the tilt of the ellipse. The three colours are pitched so that none can win: the vermilion hot enough to advance, the blue deep enough to hold it back, the green a ground between them. The eye cannot rest on the bodies without the blue pressing forward, nor on the sky without the red.
The paint is laid broadly, in places thinly, with the brushwork visible and adjustments left standing, and that roughness is part of the energy. It is the opposite of finish, not of control: each body is one contour, doing the work of anatomy and motion at once, and every distortion serves the ring. The instrument is narrow by choice, with no modelling, no texture and no detail, and its range is less than a Venetian’s or a Netherlandish master’s. Set against the programme of 1908, the canvas is strange. The painter who wanted serenity reached it, if he did, through force: a picture of balance held at the point of collision.
Movement IV
What the canvas brings into the open is first a state. Collective joy is shown as a physical force, enough to bend the bodies and flatten the hill, and the body is shown as rhythm before it is anatomy. It is rendered with overwhelming conviction, but a state is not yet a meaning. The broken grip carries the one disclosure that can be stated as true and holds: communion lasts only as long as it is renewed. The ring is not a possession of the dancers but a thing they are doing, and it is open at the place nearest the viewer. That much the canvas says. It does not uncover a hidden order of the world, and its maker did not mean it to.
The ring dance is among the oldest images people make: the round dances of village festival, the maenads of Greek vase painting, the dance at the beginning of the world. Here it is not alluded to but built. The ring is the composition, the hill is the curve of the earth, and the five bodies at the top of it are humanity at the round of the world, under a sky with nothing else in it. What the myth gives up is the particular. The dancers have no faces and no histories; they are types, and no one of them becomes archetype while staying a person. The larger cosmology, dance against music on a stair of three floors, lies across the commission.
One law governs the whole: rhythm made by contour and three flat fields. The planted dancer at the left and the flung dancer at the front, the two most distant figures in the ring, obey the same law of curve and counter-curve, and the hill obeys it too, bending under their feet as if they had shaped it. The gap is the law’s tension made visible, not a break in it. The range is narrow on purpose, one register, three colours, five figures, and the canvas removes what a programme of serenity requires it to remove: inner life, labour, the family, the state, history. What it holds, the body, the community, earth and sky and rite, it holds in one ring.
Movement V
After the Salon the canvas went to Moscow, into Shchukin’s collection. His house was open to the young Moscow painters, and the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s saw the canvas there, on the patron’s walls: that reach belongs to this canvas alone. In 1918 the collection was nationalised and became part of the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. When that museum was dissolved in 1948, Dance and Music went to the Hermitage. The canvas came through a revolution, a war and a period of official hostility to everything it stands for. How long it was kept from view in those decades is not settled here; that it came back to view is.
In the West the composition worked mainly at second hand, through reproduction and through the canvas of 1909 in New York, while this one was in Moscow and then at the Hermitage. Its force was its own: the proof that pure colour and a flattened, rhythmic figure could hold a wall at the scale once kept for history painting, and that decoration could be painting’s highest claim rather than its servant. The line of large decorative colour that followed, the mural Matisse made for the Barnes Foundation, the cut-outs, American colour-field painting, runs through his whole decorative project more than through one canvas. The force is near the top; the reach is shared.
The image is whole. The composition is entire and the colour legible as Matisse set it, and no loss to what makes the work is known. It has outlived the hostility of 1910 that met it, and it is among the most widely recognised images in modern art. The canvas yields on return, in the distortions of the limbs, the tilt of the ellipse, a colour that seems to change temperature over a long look, but much of it is given at first sight, and given on purpose. What return finds is the force again, more than a new order of sense. In St Petersburg the five are still turning on the curve of the hill, and at the front left the two hands still do not meet.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the composition, since the canvas has no words. The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take away. Five figures: four would close into a static square, six would crowd the ring into a frieze. Three colours: a fourth, a cast shadow, a flower, a tree, would put the scene somewhere and end its claim to be everywhere. The hill is one curve, because the dancers need ground to push against and nothing more. Even the apparent accident is required: close the gap between the two hands at the front left and the ring becomes an emblem, a closed wheel. The charge is small. The exact postures of the rear figures could vary without loss; their necessity is rhythmic, not particular.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What the canvas brings into the open: that the body is rhythm before it is anatomy; that collective joy is a physical force, enough to bend the bodies and flatten the hill; and, through the broken grip, that communion holds only as long as it is renewed. That last can be stated and holds, and the canvas states it with nothing but two hands that do not meet: a meaning made wholly in the image, and no less a meaning for that. But the main disclosure is a state, ecstasy and release, rather than an articulated human or social condition, and a mood ranks below a meaning. The painter’s stated aim in 1908 was balance, purity and serenity, not revelation, and that holds the axis below the gate.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The canvas reaches transport by colour and scale together. At nearly four metres wide the figures are larger than the viewer, and the vermilion against the deep blue is not a harmony but a collision held in balance: the eye cannot rest on the bodies without the blue pressing forward, nor on the sky without the red. The arched dancer at the left, planted, head at the top edge, and the dancer at the front flung toward the open hand are the ring’s two poles of force; between them the motion is continuous, so the elevation is the whole field sustained, and it does not drop. It is warm, ecstatic rather than terrible. The ceiling is the single image in a single register, which cannot rise through stages.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The ring dance is among the oldest images people make: the round dances of village festival, the maenads of Greek vase painting, the dance at the beginning of the world. Here the archetype is built, not alluded to, and it is built into every part. The ring is the composition, the hill is the curve of the earth, and five bodies at the top of it are humanity at the round of the world. Two limits hold the axis below the top. The particular barely survives: the dancers are types without faces or histories, so no particular person becomes archetype while staying particular. And the larger scheme, the dance answered by Music on a stair of three floors, lives across the commission.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The departure is from the whole European tradition of the large figure painting: modelling, perspective, local colour, anatomy, finish and subject. In their place stand three flat colours at mural scale, a contour that distorts limbs for momentum, and a subject that is nothing but motion. The Fauve canvases of 1905 had freed colour at easel size; this canvas risks it at the scale of history painting, for a patron who would live with it. The cost was paid in public, in the hostility of the Salon d’Automne of 1910. The full-size canvas of 1909 was made toward this commission, and the saturated vermilion of the bodies is this canvas’s wager alone. Held below the top only because the road from 1905 was already open.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and what the canvas knows disappears. Model the bodies and they become nudes in a landscape, the ring a scene; add perspective and the hill becomes a place, the dance an event that happened there. The knowledge, that the dance is a force and not a scene, lives in the flatness, the three fields, the cutting of the figures by the edges, and the ellipse that tilts toward the viewer at the front and away at the back. The vermilion carries it too: the canvas of 1909, the same composition in pale pink, knows something gentler. Form is the instrument in every part. The ceiling is set by the scope of what is known: one thing, known completely.
Score: 9.2 / 10
More than a century of looking and writing, and the canvas does yield on return: the broken hands; the distortions of the limbs, the foreground dancer’s leg, the arched figure at the left; the tilt of the ellipse; a colour that seems to change temperature over a long look; the relation to the canvas of 1909 and to Music; the passage from the decorative to the monumental. The formal question is not exhausted, and what is given at first sight is given again, and differently, on each return. What holds the axis here is that the canvas holds no layers of meaning in reserve: its aesthetic is immediacy and clarity, and return deepens the experience of the force more than it discloses new orders of sense.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Intrinsic force is near the top: the canvas proved that pure colour and a flattened, rhythmic figure could hold a wall at the scale kept for history painting, and that decoration could be painting’s highest claim rather than its servant. In the West it travelled through reproduction and the canvas of 1909, but what travelled is the composition this canvas realises, and its reach is credited here. The discount is that the line of large decorative colour runs through Matisse’s whole decorative project as well as through one canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s saw this canvas in Shchukin’s house, a reach its own; the Barnes mural, the cut-outs and American colour-field painting carry it with the rest of the project.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Form first: the image is whole, the composition entire, the colour legible as Matisse set it, and no loss to what makes the work is known. Presence second: the canvas passed from a private house in Moscow through the nationalisation of 1918 to a museum of modern Western art, and at that museum’s dissolution in 1948 to the Hermitage. It came through a revolution, a war and a period of official hostility to everything it stands for; how long it was kept from view in those decades is not settled, and the interruption is a real but small charge. Survival is demonstrated over more than a century: the image is among the most widely recognised in modern art, and it has long outlived the quarrel of 1910.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of oil on canvas at mural scale is here command of colour and contour, and it is load-bearing. The three colours are pitched so that none can win: the vermilion hot enough to advance, the blue deep enough to hold it, the green a ground between them. Each body is drawn with one contour that does the work of anatomy and motion at once, bending limbs beyond the possible so that the ring accelerates. The paint is laid broadly, with the brushwork visible and adjustments left in, rougher than in the canvas of 1909 and more alive for it: the opposite of finish, not of control. The charge is that the instrument is narrow by choice, with no modelling, no texture and no detail.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs everything: rhythm made by contour and by three flat fields. Take the two most distant figures, the planted, arched dancer at the left and the flung dancer at the front: they obey the same law of curve and counter-curve, and the hill and the sky obey it too. The broken grip does not break the law; it is the law’s tension made visible. What the canvas holds, stillness and motion, ground and air, joined and parted, it holds without exception, at a scale where any lapse would show. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow on purpose: one register, three colours, five figures, no opposing world. That holds the axis below 9.0.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: the body; the collective, the ring as society at its simplest; the natural order, earth and sky reduced to two colours; and, by implication, the sacred, in the dance as rite. They are integrated, not listed: the earth is the curve the bodies make, the community is the grip of hands. What holds the axis here is what the canvas removes on purpose, as a programme of serenity requires: consciousness as an inner life, labour, the family, the state and history. The scheme of the staircase would have encompassed more, but it is not the work. A single canvas holding this much at this scale earns a little above the floor, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.2, then Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. Flat colour and a distorted figure risked at the scale of history painting, at public cost; a form in which the flatness, the three fields and the tilted ring are themselves the knowledge that the dance is a force and not a scene; and a canvas that proved decoration could be painting’s highest claim, seen in Moscow by the painters of the next decade and carried in the West by its composition.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, the collective, the natural order and, by implication, the rite are held in one ring; consciousness, labour, the family, the state and history are removed by design, and the figure describes the form. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.1 and The Bottomless Well at 8.4: the disclosure is mainly a state of feeling, with the broken grip its one stated meaning, and much of the canvas is given, on purpose, at first sight.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one of five: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.1 falls short by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. The twelve sum to 102.6, an average of 8.55 that displays as 8.6, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement in Tier IV is settled on the aggregate and on the gate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and of how it was made and what became of it. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the canvas of 1910 painted for Sergei Shchukin, alone. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: Music, its pair, a separate canvas, weighed only where the pairing bears on this one; the full-size Dance of 1909 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a preparatory work used as evidence of what the canvas of 1910 changed and of the route by which the composition reached Western painters; Le Bonheur de vivre, the source of the motif; and the scheme for Shchukin’s staircase. No words are quoted: Matisse’s Notes d’un peintre of 1908 and his account of the staircase scheme in an interview of 1909 are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact dimensions, the studio in which the canvas was painted, the patron’s response after the Salon of 1910, the names of the Moscow painters who saw it, the year the canvas of 1909 entered the Museum of Modern Art, whether and for how long the canvas was withheld from view in the Soviet decades, its present rooms in the Hermitage, and its condition and restoration history.