Dance (Matisse)

Lore & Background

Dance was painted by Henri Matisse in 1910 for Russian businessman Sergei Shchukin, with whom Matisse had a long association. Until the October Revolution of 1917, the painting hung together with its companion piece, Music, on the staircase of Shchukin's Moscow mansion. The composition shows five dancing figures in strong red against a simplified green landscape and deep blue sky, reflecting Matisse's fascination with primitive art and using a classic Fauvist color palette.

Reader's Guide

Dance is commonly recognized as a key point in Matisse's career and in the development of modern painting. The painting's rhythmical succession of dancing nudes conveys emotional liberation and hedonism, and it is often associated with the 'Dance of the Young Girls' from Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. A preliminary version, Dance (I), painted in 1909 as a compositional study with paler colors and less detail, resides at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Hermitage version was loaned to H'ART Museum for six weeks in 2010. A lithographic version published in the periodical Verve in 1939 differs notably from the original, with a lime green area, nearly black sky, and thicker lines resembling a woodcut.

Did You Know?

• A preliminary version, Dance (I), painted in 1909, resides at MoMA in New York.
• The painting was first exhibited at the Salon d'Automne of 1910 at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, Paris.
• A lithographic version published in Verve in 1939 has a lime green area and nearly black sky.
• The painting was loaned to H'ART Museum for six weeks from April 1 to May 9, 2010.

Prodigy of Málaga: The Making of a Young Artist

Pablo Ruiz Picasso entered the world in the late hours of October 1881 in Málaga, Andalusia. He was the firstborn of José Ruiz y Blasco, a naturalistic painter and art professor, and María Picasso y López, whose surname traced to a Ligurian great-grandfather who settled in Spain around 1807. The boy's earliest passion was unmistakable: his mother recalled his first syllables as "piz, piz," a child's shorthand for lápiz, pencil. By seven he was in his father's studio, learning to render plaster casts and live models with the disciplined precision his academic-minded parent demanded. The family's 1891 move to A Coruña placed him under a more formal regime, and it was there that a now-legendary episode unfolded—his father allegedly finding the thirteen-year-old had painted over an unfinished pigeon sketch with such mastery that Ruiz supposedly renounced his own painting. After his young sister Conchita died of diphtheria in 1895, the family settled in Barcelona, where Picasso completed a month-long academy entrance exam in a single week and was admitted at thirteen. His father rented him a nearby room, yet checked in repeatedly each day, and the two clashed often over his drawings.

A Chameleon of Style: Periods and Transformations

Picasso's career stretched across more than seventy-six years, from his late teens to his death in 1973, and his output is commonly divided into distinct stylistic phases. The Blue Period (1901–1904) gave way to the warmer Rose Period (1904–1906), followed by an African-influenced phase (1907–1909) that culminated in the proto-Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. From 1909 to 1912 he pursued Analytic Cubism, then shifted into Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), sometimes called the Crystal period. In the late 1910s and early 1920s his work leaned neoclassical, while the mid-1920s saw Surrealist characteristics emerge. His later paintings often wove elements from all these earlier modes together. Beyond painting, he co-founded the Cubist movement, invented constructed sculpture, and co-invented collage, contributing to an extraordinary range of formal innovation. His 1937 anti-war canvas Guernica, a searing depiction of the German and Italian bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, remains one of the most recognized political paintings of the century. Critics and historians continue to debate the boundaries and names of his later periods, a testament to how restless and varied his vision remained.

The Matisse Rivalry and the Forge of Modern Art

After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to push toward more radical styles, igniting what became a lifelong and fruitful rivalry. The two men were subsequently so often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art that their names became nearly inseparable in the public narrative of twentieth-century artistic revolution. Picasso, a Spaniard who spent most of his adult life in France, brought to that competitive dynamic a restless versatility: he helped develop and explore a wide variety of styles across his career, moving from the somber tones of his Blue Period through the formal experiments of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, into neoclassical and Surrealist-influenced phases in the 1920s. Matisse's Fauvist provocations, by contrast, served as a constant catalyst, pushing Picasso to sharpen and extend his own investigations. The result was a creative dialogue that elevated both artists and helped reshape the possibilities of painting and sculpture. Critics consistently positioned them as co-leaders of the avant-garde, and their intertwined legacies remain a defining axis of modern art history. Picasso's status as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century was in no small part forged in this ongoing creative contest.

Prolific Legacy and Universal Renown

Throughout a career spanning more than seventy-six years, from his late teens to his death in 1973, Picasso maintained an output of extraordinary volume and variety. His early works, preserved in collections such as the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, offer one of the most comprehensive records of any major artist's beginnings, tracing his progression from academic realism in the mid-1890s—exemplified by The First Communion (1896) and the dramatic Portrait of Aunt Pepa, which the critic Juan-Eduardo Cirlot called one of the greatest in all of Spanish painting—to the Symbolist-inflected landscapes of 1897 rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. By fourteen, his portraits were already commanding extraordinary praise. That prodigious early start set the tone for a lifetime of relentless creation. Picasso achieved universal renown and amassed immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, becoming one of the best-known figures in twentieth-century art. His legacy extends well beyond any single style or period: he co-founded Cubism, invented constructed sculpture, co-invented collage, and helped develop an extraordinary range of approaches. The sheer breadth of his contributions—spanning painting, sculpture, and collage—ensures that his name remains one of the most recognized in the history of modern art.

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