Танец

In 1930 the American collector Albert Barnes asked Matisse to fill three high lunettes over the windows of his gallery near Philadelphia with a mural. Matisse, then in his sixties, gave it nearly three years and almost nothing else. Halfway through he realised he had been working from the wrong measurements, so the huge canvas he had nearly finished no longer fit the wall, and this is that version, the one that stayed in Paris. He started the whole thing again for Barnes at the corrected size. To design these leaping, flattened dancers, Matisse pinned sheets of painted paper, coloured grey, blue, pink and black, straight onto the canvas and shifted them around until the shapes balanced, and he drew with charcoal tied to a long bamboo cane so he could reach across the whole span. That habit of cut and pinned paper is what grew, at the end of his life when illness kept him from the easel, into the paper cut-outs.