Five Figures, One Endless Circle
A Russian merchant wanted a staircase filled with joy — what he got was one of the most radical paintings of the twentieth century.
In March 1909, Henri Matisse sat before a canvas and sketched five nude figures joined hand to hand in a circle, painted in pale, tentative colors. He called this preliminary study Dance (I), a compositional experiment rather than a finished statement. Yet even in its unfinished state, Matisse held it in high esteem, later describing it as 'the overpowering climax of luminosity.' That early panel would eventually find its way to New York, donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr Jr. to the Museum of Modern Art, where it remains today.
The true commission came from Sergei Shchukin, a Russian businessman and art collector who had built a long relationship with Matisse and wanted large decorative panels for the staircase of his Moscow mansion. Matisse delivered two companion works: Dance and Music. Painted in 1910, Dance depicted the same five figures, now rendered in a strong, saturated red, set against a stark green landscape and a deep blue sky — a composition stripped of ornament, pushed toward pure emotional force.
The painting made its public debut at the Salon d'Automne of 1910, held at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées in Paris, running from October 1 to November 8. Audiences accustomed to more restrained academic painting encountered instead five bodies caught mid-motion, locked in a rhythm that seemed to spill beyond the canvas edges.
Until the October Revolution of 1917, Dance and Music hung together on the staircase of Shchukin's Moscow home, exactly as intended — a private, domestic monument to movement and sound. The upheaval of revolution eventually separated the paintings from their original setting, and they were bequeathed to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where they remain displayed side by side to this day.
What makes Dance so striking is its palette and simplicity. The intense red of the figures against the cool blue-green backdrop follows a classic Fauvist logic, but here Matisse pushes it toward something almost primal. Art historians have noted his incipient fascination with what was then called 'primitive art,' and the rhythmic succession of dancing nudes has been read as an expression of emotional liberation and hedonism.
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