"Autour de la Danse de Matisse" par Pascal Rousseau

Opening Session 1/2 Body, Painting, Architecture: Through the different versions of Matisse's Dance, two reflections on the dancing body and its evolution in painting and architecture. April 13, 2013, Paris Pascal Rousseau is Professor of Art History at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, HiCSA. For the third consecutive year, the Galerie Colbert opens its doors to the general public. A historic site preserving the memory of the 19th century and its famous "passages," it has housed most of the Île-de-France region's art history teaching and research institutions, as well as the National Heritage Institute, since 2001. The April 13, 2013 Meetings will provide an opportunity to visit this leading center of research, training, and international cooperation in art history, and to discover the expertise, analytical tools, and methods of examination and interpretation of the researchers who work there: historians of art, literature, the performing arts, the screen, and photography, as well as heritage and library curators and restorers. Once again, a work has been chosen to unite reflections and fuel debates, a work that is decisive for the history of the avant-garde, fascinating for the influences it received and exerted, as well as for its relationships with arts other than painting and cultures other than Europe: Matisse's Dance. Commissioned in early 1909, along with its companion piece Music, by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin for the decoration of his Moscow mansion, the work (now housed in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg) is one of the highest achievements of Fauvism and admirably demonstrates the explorations of an artist freeing himself from the traditional representational rules of Western art. "Decorative panel," according to the title of the catalog for the 1910 Salon d'Automne where the second version of the work was presented, Dance is nonetheless a masterful expression of a round dance through simplified forms and color relationships. "My first and principal structural element was rhythm," Matisse wrote of this version, "the second, a large surface of deep blue (an allusion to the Mediterranean sky), the third a green mound (the green of Mediterranean pines)." With this information, my nude figures could only be vermillion to achieve a luminous harmony." The power of this transposition of reality lies in the confrontation between the arts, in the relationships that any image establishes between space and time, and in the discovery of non-European arts, whose "primitivism" thwarts the effects of illusionism. The multiple subjects that can be addressed from this work—the tension between the "decorative" and "expressive" dimensions of art, the relationship of the visual arts to movement, the notion of color-light, the influence of non-Western arts, ... not to mention the question raised by the repetition and variations of the same theme in an artist's work—go far beyond Matisse's interest in dance. In fact, they concern not only the entire history of this art, from the satyrs and maenads of Antiquity to Pina Bausch and Carolyn Carlson, but also all artistic practices: painting, architecture, sculpture, decorative arts, theater and opera, music, photography, cinema, video, and performance. Matisse's Dance thus sheds light on contexts other than that of its creation, on arts other than painting. The researcher presentations, workshops and round tables, and screenings that will punctuate this day will cover the historiographical scope of the work and its development (Dance at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Dance at the Barnes Foundation, etc.), the challenges of its development, reception, and conservation, its distant origins in time and space, and, of course, its relevance to contemporary art.