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The Dance (1909)

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one of Matisse's most celebrated and controversial paintings

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a daring foray into avant garde experiment

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challenged the principles upon with academic painting was based

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emerged from Matisse's informal academy established in 1908

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invited students to experiment

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to push the potential of line and color into uncharted territory

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he evacuated his bodies of the erotic qualities that usually accompany the nude

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resulted in a spectacular disfiguring of the female body

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was seen by many as an assault on the eye

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threw to waste the ideals of the nude

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Matisse's Blue Nude

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a disturbingly twisted naked body

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was seen to be more offensive than Manet's Olympia

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female form in which the naturalism is heightened

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naked bodies in The Dance are for most viewers not erotic

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and they are unrewarding

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like watching a stone drop into water

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your eye follows the expanding circles and it takes a deliberate, almost perverse effort of will, to keep focusing on the point of first impact

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originally intended to paint on commission for the Russian art patron Sergei Shchukin

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appeared to contemporary viewers as a fragment of a work of art rather than a worked out picture

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a bold experiment of line and color of five women dancing in an open space

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garnered negative criticism

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the flattened-out picture is plain

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the abstracted female bodies and large expanses of bright primary color, unrewarding

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gender theorists have proposed that the regimes of looking in visual culture privilege a male viewer who exercises an active gaze towards female subjects who, occupying a passive position, produce pleasure through reinforcing masculine power in narratives that celebrate male agency

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works such as Matisse's The Dance threaten to upset those regimes of looking

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five naked female bodies move in a circular formation pulling each other through a dynamic movement that is pleasing to view, along with the harmony that the rhythm of these bodies in space create

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but there is no sexual pleasure here for spectators

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the women's bodies have been evacuated of erotic content

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the expectations in viewing a female nude immediately demand particular viewing codes, which are frustrated by Matisse's sparse evocation of movement in space

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the subject of the painting has more to do with the color harmonies created by use of pigment and economical line

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the pale pink bodies reminiscent of attic pot figures

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the bold green of the space upon which the figures are located and the brilliant blue of the sky, combining into an explosion of color which forges a new harmonic regime

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all the pleasure in the work is reserved for the women themselves, who through their dance, have taken over the agency usually accorded to the viewers of the nude in a selfish act of refusal

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the dancers do not address the spectator, and indeed, they are not even remotely concerned about us

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there is no agency for us, the spectators

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we merely witness the spectacle

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the potential for fantasy is limited

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the dancers do not address the spectator

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they don't rely upon the conventions of the academy for their authority

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they establish their own way of being isolated in their pleasure