Le Danseur

Madame Wanda de Guébriant a confirmé l'authenticité de cette oeuvre.


Dance and dancers meant a great deal to Henri Matisse throughout his life. He returned to the dance again and again, choosing it as the subject of his riskiest and most ambitious projects, identifying with his dancers who became in some sense stand-ins or alter egos for the artist himself. "I feel more alive in the dance: its expressive, rhythmic movements, its music which I love," he explained towards the end of his long life. "It was inside me, that dance"1. He was in his seventieth year when he made the small, expressive, red Danseur in March, 1938, as part of his preliminary designs for the ballet called L'Etrange Farandole2.

The farandole was the tune that Matisse said was inside him, "like a rhythm that carried me along"3. It had haunted him since his student days when he and other young painters joined hands with the working people of Montmartre - all of them ill-paid and undernourished, the artists among them not only unemployed but unemployable - in an anarchic line of dancers who released their rage, misery and impotence by leaping round the floor of the Moulin de la Galette in the plunging rhythms of the farandole. He sang and whistled the tune in 1910 as he painted the huge wall panel commissioned by the Moscow collector, Sergei Shchukin: the Danse (Hermitage Museum, Saint-Petersbourg) with its ring of blood-red, leaping, larger-than-lifesize figures that sometimes frightened even Matisse himself. In 1931 he whistled the same tune again while working on a second immense wall painting, also called the Danse (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), for the American collector, Albert Barnes. Matisse said that in each case the farandole drew the images out of him without conscious intent so that they materialised apparently of their own accord at the tip of his brush or stick of charcoal4. It was Lénide Massine, one of the first people to see the completed Barnes mural, who begged Matisse to recreate it as a ballet décor for Les Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo5. When the painter finally agreed after a gap of several years, he worked out his design (as he had done for Barnes' Danse) with the help of coloured paper cut-outs.

Le Danseur is one of a series of experimental collages that function independantly in their own right, rather than as disposable off-cuts of the working process. For the first time Matisse was carving directly into colour as he would do in the majestic cut-paper constructions of his last years, by which time he said that scissors in his hands had become more sensitive even than brush or pencil6. But at this early stage his scissors were still relatively hesitant. Their clumsiness is in large part what gives this chunky, compact little Danseur an unexpected emotional charge, as if something powerful but incoherent were taking shape and thrusting its way upwards from the depths of its creator's imagination. A first impression of fluidity and spontaneity is modified on closer inspection by gropings and fumblings. Nearly all the outlines of the red paper figure have snippets of torn or cut paper glued on top, or protruding from underneath, to sharpen the muscular junction of legs and torso, narrow the contours of hip and back, emphasise the tentative left arm and the backward-dragging slant of the geometrical right leg. All these adjustments accentuate the vulnerability and isolation of the central figure, boxed in by a rectangular frame of grey, purple, white and blue strips of painted paper. The layering and piecing, the snick marks of scissors and the faint glue stains in this paper patchwork Danseur bring us very close to Matisse's creative process, both the first broad sweep of conception and the subsequent slow, precise, hard labour of afterthought and realignment.

A rough sketch for what eventually became the curtain of L'Etrange Farandole, Le Danseur is also an initial statement of the ballet's central theme, "the struggle between man's spiritual side and his carnal side"7, the perennial conflict in Matisse's work between line and colour, inhibition and instinct, relentless discipline and the passion it both controls and liberates. The ballet dramatised this struggle through what Matisse called "the music of colours"8, massed and moving red, blue, yellow, black and white dancers deployed against an architectural white ground. The artist portrays himself in the clumsy, earthbound aspect of this all-too-human Dancer, who expresses so touchingly the pain and weight of disciplined effort that lie behind the performer's apparently effortless bouyancy and grace, embodied by the white bird soaring against a rectangle of blue sky, and its black counterpart - bird or weightless streamer - in the top part of the canvas.

This is one of a whole set of collage figure studies produced in 1938, all loosely based on a small oil painting by the fifteenth-century Italian Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Ercole e Anteo (fig. 1), an image of extreme violence that increasingly preoccupied Matisse in the late 1930s when he feared that his ability to paint in oils was beginning to desert him9. The main thrust of Pollaiuolo's painting, which showed Hercules crushing the life out of his opponent, was gradually transferred in Matisse's ballet studies from the brutal killer to the figure struggling to cut free. Hercules' aggressive stance becomes altogether more defensive in The Danseur. A second sketch, Petit danseur sur fond rouge (Private collection, France), elaborates the pose into a vigorous serpentine curve, a life-giving arabesque in human form. In Deux danseurs, "Rouge et Noir" (fig. 2) - a more elaborate study for the ballet curtain, which is by far the most densely worked of this whole series - the soaring shapes from Le Danseur coalesce into a liberated, air-borne ballerina. It is as though the premonitory ballet designs Matisse made in 1938 chart a process of imaginative renewal that would eventually bear strange fruit. Le Danseur, reversed and reworked as Le Clown (fig. 3), became in 1947 the frontispiece to Jazz, one of the twentieth century's boldest and most sumptuous printed books, where for the first time Matisse used cut-and-painted paper to explore the world of radiant light and colour which he would make triumphantly his own in the great cut-paper collages of his final decade.

Notes:

1 D. Fourcade, Henri Matisse. Ecrits et propos sur l'art, Paris, 1972, p. 63.
2 The original name of the ballet, which opened in Monte Carlo 11 May, 1939, and at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris on 5 June, 1939 (it was renamed Le Rouge et le Noir only for the New York opening in 1940). For the date of Le Danseur, see L. Delectorskaya, L'Apparente Facilité Henri Matisse, Peintures 1835-1939, Paris, 1988, p. 271.
3 D. Fourcade, op. cit., pp. 151-152.
4 D. Fourcade, op. cit., p. 151.
5 P. Courthion, 'Conversations avec Henri Matisse', unpublished thesis, Los Angeles, p. 88; Matisse collaborated with Massine on the ballet's scenario, choreography and the choice of music.
6 See H. Spurling, Matisse the Master. A Life of Henri Matisse 1909-1954, London, 2005, vol. II, pp. 429 & 494, no. 15.
7 L. Delectorskaya , Lydia Delectorskaya in conversation with the author, Paris, 1995, p. 272.
8 D. Fourcade, op. cit., p. 154.
9 See L. Delectorskaya, ibid, p. 272; and see H. Spurling, ibid, pp. 353-355, 358 & 385.