Description
Henri Matisse – The Dance (second version)
| Year of Creation: | 1910 |
| Original size: | 391 cm x 260 cm |
| Paint style: | Fauvism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Hermitage, St. Petersburg |
The Dance “Dance” is one of Matisse’s most famous masterpieces, depicting five people holding hands and excitedly forming a circle, maintaining a sustained dynamic and giving people a sense of peaceful silence. In this work, pure and full color and a strong contrast between colors replace all interpretation and speech, the color blocks themselves form a dance in the painting, their junctions look hard and tense, and the rhythm is somehow cut, disconnected… , but it still works smoothly. In this way, Matisse combines dance, music and other artistic elements. The composition of the painting is simple, and the colors are not luxurious. In a direct sense, it expresses the richest connotations in the simplest way and gives us a wild vitality.Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was born in the town of Lecado in southern France. His father was a businessman, and his mother worked as a painter in a ceramics factory. As a teenager he spent time in Vermandois, and after finishing high school he studied law in Paris at his father’s request, returning to Saint-Condé near his hometown and working as a clerk in a law firm. At the age of 21, he was admitted to the hospital with cecalitis, and his mother gave him a box of paints, a set of brushes and a painting manual for self-study to alleviate his boredom. Matisse felt “freedom, peace and leisure” for the first time in his life. Matisse’s passion for painting was uncontrollable, he was famous for using vivid and bold colors and thus became a famous French painter, the originator and main exponent of Fauvism, as well as a sculptor and printmaker.
