ABSTRACT
Sergei Shchukin signed a contract with the Galeries Bernheim-Jeune, and towards the end of World War I, he began to take winter sojourns in Nice that soon extended to all but the warmest months of summer. The Alfred Barr took his theme from Dance II, one of the panels he painted for Shchukin’s Moscow home in 1909–10—and which he had first used in the Joy of Life, his 1905–06 picture that Albert Barnes had owned for nearly a decade. The technique he devised was to draw his dancers on large sheets of colored paper then have them cut out and pinned to the canvases. The object was to humanize the dancers, which had been created, as art historian Pierre Schneider has pointed out, by “a mechanical technique using ‘prefabricated’ materials.” In the Merion Dance, Henri Matisse took an irreversible step into the modern world by introducing quantitative concepts into the art of painting.
