Der Tanz

In 1930 the American collector Albert Barnes asked Matisse to fill three tall lunettes above the windows of his gallery near Philadelphia. Matisse rented an old garage in Nice big enough to work at full scale, and to shift the huge dancing figures around he began pinning up shapes cut from painted paper, the technique that would carry him through his final years. Then he discovered the wall measurements he had been given were wrong. Rather than adjust the picture, he painted the entire thing again from scratch. The second version went up in 1933, tucked into the arches so the pale bodies seem to press against the curved ceiling. He wrote to his son that the moment it was fixed to the wall, it stopped belonging to him and became part of the building.