[MUSIC] Here we are back at MoMA. Come let's look at one of Henri Matisse's most celebrated and controversial paintings - his 1909 canvas The Dance. Here it is given pride of place in the galleries at New York's superb Museum of Modern Art. This festive dynamic and light work is one of the artists more daring forays into avant-garde experiment. Challenging the principles upon which academic painting was based, and emerging from Matisse’s informal academy established in 1908. Here he invited his students to throw caution to the winds, and to push the potential of line and colour into uncharted territory. The Dance follows works that had brought him critical notoriety, such as his brilliant Blue Nude, his Luxe Calme et Volupté and his Bonheur de Vivre. In these paintings, and especially in the Blue Nude, Matisse evacuated his bodies of the erotic qualities that usually accompany the nude and indeed embarked upon a paintly regime that according to some critics and historians resulted in a spectacular disfiguring of the female body. Thought by most spectators in the early 20th century and by many still today as an assault on the eye. These works by Matisse, threw to waste the ideals of the nude and created a critical [INAUDIBLE] that paralleled the reception of Manet's Olympia in the mid-19th century. But the Blue Nude goes further than Manet's Olympia, producing what was considered to be a disturbingly twisted naked body that was so confronting. It was seen to be even more pornographic and offensive than the Olympia. Although produced in hues of blue, it presents, nevertheless, a study of the female form in which the naturalism is heightened, giving the viewer a more challenging representation of the female body that was more radical than most of what has gone before. The naked bodies before the viewer in Matisse's The Dance are for most viewers not erotic. But are they, as Leo Steinberg suggested, unrewarding? Steinberg claimed that viewing Matisse's pictures of this period is somewhat like watching a stone drop into water. Your eye follows the expanding circles, and it takes a deliberate, almost a perverse effort of will, to keep focusing on the point of first impact, because it is so unrewarding. Steinberg's assessment of the great French modernist, is according to the Harvard art historian, Yves Alain Bois the most accurate words ever written about Matisse's painting. What did Leo Steinberg mean when he described Matisse's pictures as unrewarding? And why did Yves Alain Bois find his words so resonant? Do you agree with them? Let's go see. Matisse's The Dance originally a sketch for a work Matisse intended to paint on commission for the Russian art patron Sergei Shchukin might have appeared to contemporary viewers as a mere fragment of a work of art rather than a fully worked out picture. And indeed The Dance has its origins at least in part in the circular formation of dances that are seen in the middle ground of his earlier work his Joie de Vivre. This bold experiment in line and colour of five women dancing in an open space garnered negative criticism then as it does today from some viewers who still find the flattened out picture plain. The abstracted female bodies in large expanses of bright primary colour hard work and, well, unrewarding. 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. Works such as Matisse's The Dance threaten to upset those regimes of looking. In Matisse's picture, five naked female bodies move in a circular formation pulling each other through a dynamic movement that is pleasing to view in relationship to their movement which their bodies enact, and the harmony that the rhythm of these bodies in space create. But there is no sexual pleasure here for many spectators. The women's bodies have been evacuated of erotic content, and many viewers whose expectations in viewing a female nude immediately demand particular viewing codes, and are frustrated by Matisse's sparse evocation of movement in space. Here, the pleasure has more to do with the colour harmonies created by the use of pigment, and the economical line. The pale pink bodies reminiscent of attic pot figures which is heightened in the later version in The Hermitage. The bold green of the space upon which the figures are located and the brilliant blue of the sky combine into an explosion of colour which forges a new harmonic regime. 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. There is no agency for us, the spectators. We merely witness their spectacle. There are very few points of entry for the viewer here. The narrative potential of the work, the potential for fantasy is limited. Do we, like Leo Steinberg's stone, enter the water of the composition and radiate across its spectrum before disappearing into its recesses? If so, it seems the dancers won't mind. They do not address the spectator. And indeed, they are not even remotely concerned about us. There is no gaze emerging from the dancers to meet our own, no meeting with our own gaze that seeks our approval. Is this what Leo Steinberg meant when he claimed that Matisse's pictures were unrewarding. Here we have a group of women who are naked rather than nude, they don't rely upon the conventions of the academy for their authority. Instead they established their own way of being isolated in their pleasure. What do you think? Is Matisse's approach to the nude liberating? [MUSIC]
