dance — Blog — Santa Classics

The Dance was commissioned by a Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, with whom
Matisse had a long association. This painting hung together with Matisse’ Music on the staircase of Shchukin's Moscow mansion. A year after the Russian Revolution his house and collection was confiscated via a decree signed by Lenin. His home then became the State Museum of New Western Art. In 1948, Stalin signed the

decree which closed it down because of its “bourgeois artwork”. The contents were then split between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage Museum.

Dance (II) was commissioned by a businessman and art collector Albert Barnes with whom Matisse also had a long association. It hung above the windows in the main gallery of his home (which housed 24 other Matisse paintings). After a lengthy lawsuit following his death, the Barnes Foundation collection was appropriated by the city of Philadelphia, and relocated to the Parkway near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A third version (which was a study for the first) was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller, a businessman and art collector, and donated to the MOMA. I guess businessmen just “Wanna Dance”.

To see original: https://bit.ly/4jhX5PU

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas affected disdain toward the improvised outdoor landscape studies for which many of the Impressionists became known. He clung to the habit of drawing on location in preparation for his pictures and insisted on finishing in the studio routinely with models. Degas considered himself a Realist painter. He attempted to paint things as they were, versus how he perceived them to be. Still, the art world considers him an Impressionist artist as he adopted their loose strokes and play on light.
Degas and the ballet are virtually synonymous. Dancers, shown in every phase of their complex and demanding art form, make up more than fifty percent of his abundant output. He created approximately 1,500 paintings, monotypes and drawings.
He was aware, from an early point in his studies, of the exhaustion of the ballerinas, and the extent to which they pushed the limits of their bodies. He was further conscious of the brevity of a dancer’s career. Here the chaperone’s face still displays youthful features, yet she is more than likely an ex-dancer. The younger woman represents what her forlorn looking companion once was.

To see original: bit.ly/3o4o32n

Henri Matisse - The Dance

Edgar Degas - Waiting