The Creation Story of a Monumental Matisse

H ere’s the oft-told tale of the birth of “The Dance,” one of Henri Matisse’s most spectacular works and a signature treasure of the Barnes Foundation. In September of 1930, the 60-year-old Frenchman visited the United States to sit on the jury for the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, the country’s most prestigious invitational show.

Leaving Pittsburgh, Matisse and a couple of the other judges, plus the Carnegie’s director, made their way to New York for Matisse to catch his steamer, but with a stop on the way in Philadelphia. Lunch was planned there with a prominent patron of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, so with the morning to kill, Matisse and a translator headed out to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, for a meeting with Albert Barnes. At the door to the foundation, Barnes sent the translator off for a stroll around the grounds. He walked Matisse into the foundation’s grandest gallery, where they were surrounded by the work of the painter’s greatest predecessors—Cézanne’s “Card Players”; Seurat’s “Models”—and then Barnes dropped a bombshell: Would the painter accept a commission for what Barnes called “probably the most important monument to your life’s work”? It would be a mural, something like 40 feet long by more than 10 feet high, to fill the vast empty spaces high above the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows. The conversation that followed ran long. The poor translator, on the wrong side of a locked door but tasked with getting the Frenchman to the luncheon on time, eventually found a coal chute that could give him access. Climbing up from the foundation’s cellar, he released Matisse from Barnes’s clutches and spirited him off to his meal.

It’s a lovely genesis story, repeated in several versions, and adds to the long list of yarns that enliven our collective Life of Saint Barnes. (For some it’s a Barnes demonology.) And there’s every reason to think much of it is myth.

What the record actually shows is Matisse writing to Barnes from New York to ask for “permission,” as he put it, to visit the foundation and meet its founder at some point during his American stay. He then seems to have made the trip twice within the same week—alone, as far as we can tell—getting the mural commission on the first, then fleshing it out on the second.

Once back in France, Matisse immediately wrote to Barnes that despite a hideous crossing his mind had been entirely focused on the “honor” of the new project. He gingerly asked Barnes what the fee might be and in reply, Barnes took the clever step of asking Matisse himself to set it: “The discussion of money in all such matters is an embarrassing one”—not at all true for Barnes, ever—“And especially in this case since I am sure you would take into consideration the fact that your work would have a setting such as it would have nowhere else in the world.” In the end the painter asked for $30,000, 15 times what a French professor might earn in a year but less than Barnes spent on four of the Matisse canvases he began to stock up on that very fall.

It seems that Matisse knew he’d lowballed his fee. “Although there’ll be no profit in it for me, this work will have important consequences,” Matisse told his wife.

His excitement about the mural made sense. Early in the century, he had launched his career as the most radical of radicals—The New York Times had called his paintings “revolting in their inhumanity”—but for most of the 1920s, he had been making attractive works that functioned “like a good armchair,” as Matisse himself had written. Critics had begun to agree and to complain about his new work’s complacency. Barnes himself rarely bought the painter’s art from that era, and talked about it as a retread of what had come before.

“I was beginning to walk in place,” Matisse admitted to his daughter, and now he would have the chance to move forward again thanks to the commission from Barnes. “He said, ‘Paint whatever you like just as if you were painting for yourself,’” Matisse recalled.

What Matisse “liked” turned out to be a series of dancing, leaping bodies floating against a blue and pink “sky,” the whole thing more stylized than anything he’d done before, nudging up against cutting-edge abstraction. (Although those bodies’ hemispherical breasts might have been inspired by some rather earlier stylizations: Matisse would have noticed the half grapefruits that Renoir installed on the beloved nudes that Barnes would be hanging near the mural; Matisse’s dancers pun on them.)

When Matisse had first hit his stride as an artist in fin de siècle Paris, mural paintings (décorations was the term of art) had been in vogue among leaders of the avant-garde like Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Three decades later, with the Barnes commission, Matisse realized that he could move the whole genre beyond what they had done. He complained that his predecessors’ murals had mostly been nothing more than extra-large paintings that happened to be stuck on the wall; at the foundation, he would one-up them by making a work that merged with the architecture, even pretending to pierce it to let in a view of the real sky outside. Ever since the Italian Renaissance, those kinds of quadratura effects had been the major conceit behind murals, but they had been out of favor for something like a century and so were ripe for revival. As Matisse told an American journalist, “My aim has been to translate paint into architecture, to make of the fresco the equivalent of stone or cement. This, I think, is not often done any more.” He went so far as to use a stony gray for the skin of the dancers, as though they were sculptural ornaments for a building rather than living figures—just as Michelangelo had mimicked bronze and marble “statues” in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Matisse made sure his viewpoint on the canvas in the garage where he painted it would match the view onto it at the foundation, just the kind of strategy Renaissance muralists deployed as they worked to erase the boundary between the painted and the real.

And then Matisse combined that retrospective gesture, which suited the conservative streak in his art, with an experimental modernism that spoke to the fauve—the “wild beast”—in him.

You have to wonder if the mural’s radically pared-back look, quite new to Matisse, had something to do with the nation it was conceived in; watersheds in his art often had to do with recent travel. He’d been impressed by New York and its potential as artistic inspiration—“Those towers, those masses rearing themselves in the air in that light which is like crystals”—and thought that the sheer dynamism of America could pass over into its art. Ideas about the New World might have played a role in the new dynamism Matisse decided to instill into his American mural.

“An American artist should express America,” Matisse had said, at the time of his first visit to Merion. Did that hold true for a painting commissioned to live there? With the United States recognized worldwide as the home of everything truly modern, the country maybe deserved to see a mural that revealed Matisse at his most modern as well.

Barnes had no complaint—or at least no comment—when Matisse sent him photos of the full-size sketches for the Merion project, a few months after taking it on. But that was about all that Matisse’s patron did get to see, because a delivery date for the mural got put off again and again.

B efore the “Dance” commission, Barnes had already amassed something like 25 Matisses, including such gorgeously “inhuman” early works as “The Joy of Life” and “The Red Madras Headdress.” As Barnes waited for “The Dance” to appear on his wall, he dug still deeper into Matisse, picking up almost as many pictures as he had in the previous two decades.

In February of 1931, a New York dealer offered to sell Barnes the “Three Sisters with Grey Background,” a classic Matisse from 1917 of white women in exoticizing “Eastern” dress. Barnes already owned Matisse’s two other paintings of those same women, and snagging the third would give his collection an ideal window into his favorite chapter in modern art, when figures were still far from abstract but had fully escaped old master realism. The “Sisters” triptych, said Barnes in one of his trademark disquisitions, gave “enough information to make the figures interesting as human beings” while also providing “a form suitable for inclusion in a highly ornamental ordering of color-planes.” The triptych had exactly the balance of modern design and classic humanism that was at the heart of his theory of plastic form. To his eyes, the sisters’ oblong faces also rhymed with the African masks that meant so much to him and with the Persian miniatures he’d now begun to collect. One of the “Sisters” paintings actually featured an African statue, as though Matisse had set out to illustrate the pioneering Civic Club lecture that Barnes had given a few years earlier, citing modernism's roots in Africa. The compare-and-contrast among the three paintings, and then with their various exotic “precedents,” made for the kind of teaching moment the foundation was built around.

And yet, in an uncharacteristic moment of generosity, Barnes asked the dealer to delay the sale for a few days to see if curators in the deluxe new buildings of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, who also had their eyes on the painting, might be able to raise the money and take it themselves. When the museum’s fundraising came up short, its board asked Barnes to arrange for the deadline on the sale to be extended. Since the dealer insisted on sticking to the original timeline, Barnes bought the painting for himself instead, for $15,000, and that was that. Or at least that’s how the dealer and Barnes recalled the transaction, with documentation to back them up. Museum officials, used to years of abuse from Barnes, claimed they had discovered the picture in the first place and accused Barnes of buying it out from under them. “We always knew Barnes was a son of a bitch,” the museum’s director, Fiske Kimball, wrote to a local collector, “and now we can prove it.”

Their tale of a double cross began to circulate, and when it was still doing the rounds almost four years later, Barnes had had enough: Anyone of note in the Philadelphia art world received an open letter setting out the evidence for his version of events. Barnes insisted that the tale “could have originated only in the imagination of either an ignoramus or an ungrateful son-of-a-bitch” and described the art museum, not for the last time, as a “house of artistic and educational prostitution.” He invited the museum’s chairman, Sturgis Ingersoll, to settle the “libel” with his fists. Setting out to clear his name, Barnes merely confirmed his growing reputation as a brute.

It’s worth remembering, however, that in most of what passed for his brutish acts, Barnes did little actual harm to anyone but himself—the Matisse squabble being a possible and rather minor exception, if there really was a double cross involved.

He was like a great bulldog, unmuzzled, with the most brutal of barks but hardly ever proceeding to bite.

A t the dawn of the 1930s, Barnes had a huge emotional investment in Matisse, and a financial one as well. As always with him, those had to be matched by an intellectual engagement. Just weeks after proposing the mural commission, Barnes told Matisse that the foundation would be publishing an entire monograph about him, “from your earliest pictures to the latest ones.”

That book was the major preoccupation for Barnes and his staff over the next few years. They worked, valiantly, to arrange a trip to see the great early Matisses in Soviet Russia, but ultimately failed. Barnes was especially keen on seeing a dance-themed décoration commissioned two decades earlier by a Moscow plutocrat that was a major precedent for the foundation’s own “Dance.” Although the work made for Russia was radical in the almost total stylization of its figures—Matisse was returning to that in the foundation commission—the Moscow piece was, in Matisse’s own terms, just a “picture” stuck on the wall, not a “mural” meant to join with the architecture around it.

In the summer of 1931, barely six months after signing the contract for “The Dance,” Barnes was chortling over his good fortune that a big Matisse retrospective was opening at a gallery in Paris. He claimed to have been there almost daily, from the moment it opened until 6 p.m., carrying his note-taking to such manic lengths that he went home that fall with a thousand pages of thoughts on the paintings.

Barnes roped his former staffer Henry Hart, now an editor at Scribner’s publishing house, into persuading his bosses to put out the book, despite a depressed economy that made it an unlikely purchase for struggling Americans. (At $5 a book, it ended up selling all of 462 copies in its first nine months.)

“It’s discerning, it’s imaginative and it’s wise,” Hart wrote to Barnes. “At the risk of being emotional, I want to say that it is exactly the mature production, shorn of all triviality, that is typical of your best moments.”

But Barnes himself might have had a more accurate take. “I am afraid it is too meaty and too scientific to be a popular book,” he wrote to Dewey. Even most specialists might have found the book on the chewy side. After the usual throat clearing about Deweyan psychology and aesthetics, it proceeds to cover all the usual Barnesian ground—Matisse and drawing, Matisse and color, Matisse and light—and then gives wildly detailed accounts of 16 exemplary paintings, every last one of which happened to be in a certain Barnes Foundation.

“Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia, his assistant in the dissecting rooms at Merion, Pa., have performed an autopsy on the art of Henri-Matisse,” said the book’s review in the New York Herald Tribune. “It is difficult to cut very deep into an art that is all on the surface, but the incision, if it must be made, has been made with the utmost thoroughness. It has indeed been performed so satisfactorily and with such extraordinary skill in the handling of modern esthetic instruments, that it need never be repeated. For that we should all be thankful.”

That review was written by a longtime enemy of Barnes’s who should never have been given the assignment. But it does capture a fundamental flaw in the Barnes approach. As many an art critic has had to learn, whatever the excitement and pleasure that come with protracted looking at a picture—noting its every detail, digging deep into how and why those details come together—the excitement isn’t matched by the experience of protracted reading about the results of such looking. In the five solid pages Barnes devotes to his analysis of the “Three Sisters" triptych, you can tell how much he enjoyed taking his notes. It’s hard to share in that enjoyment, reading a typical sentence like the following: “In the central canvas, one hand with six fingers makes a rhythm with the many-lined pattern of a fan; the hand holding the fan resembles a fin, but in shape it is related to the sleeve and various sections of the gown, together with which it forms a rosette-pattern radiating from the wrist; in the panel on the right, the hand with only two fingers looks more like a lobster’s claw than a human hand, but the pattern made by this distortion harmonizes with the adjacent linear patterns of the cuff, collar, face and arm; likewise, the right hand of the seated figure in the picture on the left is an integral part of the pattern of the turban.” To Barnes’s credit, this time he made sure to include his analyses at the very back of his book, merely as a vast appendix.

Even after hiring Matisse to fill a major space in the foundation and buying his paintings by the dozen, Barnes avoids the unrelenting enthusiasm we’d expect from just about any other collector. He’s willing to praise Matisse for having vitality, great erudition, and an adventurous spirit. But those don’t in the end counterbalance an accomplishment that Barnes sees as essentially decorative, lacking “the more profound interpretative values, both human and plastic, characteristic of the greatest artists.”

H enri Matisse, one of France’s greatest living painters, is just finishing a mural 14 by 40 feet in his Nice studio, which he expects to be recognized as his greatest canvas. It has been painted for the Barnes Foundation at Merion, Pa.” That news appeared in The Wall Street Journal on February 10, 1932, and you can just imagine Barnes’s excitement at the prospect of receiving, and at last seeing, his long-awaited mural.

And then, disaster.

“Avez fait erreur énorme,” Barnes cabled Matisse some 10 days later—You’ve made a huge mistake.

For the previous few weeks, Matisse had been wiring Barnes with questions about the dimensions of his almost-finished mural, and Barnes finally came to realize that the painting would not fit the foundation’s architecture: it was off by several feet where the vault curved down to meet the wall. The telegram Matisse sent in reply was surprisingly sanguine, saying he would put the final touches on the failed first version—it ended up at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris—and then would start at once on a brand-new one.

Barnes made an emergency trip to France, but there’s no record of fireworks when the two men met in Paris. Barnes recalled that they had a fine time together, and in a cheery letter to the painter he merely expressed hope that the work on the new mural was “advancing in a manner that is satisfactory.”

One explanation seems most likely for Barnes’s improbable equipoise: He might not have been entirely convinced by the final studies for the mural, apparently given to him by Matisse as a kind of consolation for messing up its measurements. While Barnes had been complaining that Matisse had lapsed into ringing minor changes on his early innovations, it’s not clear the collector was looking for anything as new as the minimal, almost geometric style of the mural. Barnes criticized Picasso for a tendency to “veer about in obedience to the latest wind that blows.” And here was his man Matisse apparently making like a wind sock, veering toward the “wholly non-representative painting” that had been making recent inroads but that Barnes had always condemned as empty play with pattern.

Whatever his true feelings, Barnes wasn’t about to give up on a commission that had been so much in the news.

As he painted, Matisse had found Barnes and his team so eager to get the mural that it was “as if they were waiting for a god.” The pressure seems to have brought out the perfectionist in him, until Barnes had to beg him just to declare the thing done, after delays caused by such absurdities as the disabling sunburn Matisse got on his legs, one time when he was working outside on some drawings.

But at last came the day, on May 14, 1933, when the great painting was up on the wall in Merion—and fit its allotted space. The accident-prone project came with yet another near disaster. Matisse had insisted on starting the installation himself, hammering away for two hours—and then collapsing from a heart attack. “We gave him some whiskey and made him rest and he was all right in an hour or two,” Barnes said, but he nevertheless had the artist examined by a specialist. After running the latest in high-tech tests, the doctor ordered absolute rest and Matisse’s immediate return from America.

Shipboard on his way home, Matisse had written to his daughter that Barnes had been pleased with the newly installed painting. “To prove this to me”—note the sense that it needed proving—“Madame Barnes told me that the next day the Doctor assembled all of his students, a hundred of them, and spoke for two hours in front of the decoration.” But he was disappointed that Barnes, “a complete misanthrope,” was now refusing to show it to the public, as had once been promised. Barnes put off several visitors who asked to see the mural that summer and fall; he kept claiming that its scaffolding had yet to be removed.

Just before he’d packed it up for shipping to Merion, Matisse had voiced high hopes for the canvas. He’d felt confident that his “real mural painting” would do just the architectural work he had planned on, adding a fictional sky to the real greenery seen through the huge windows below. But contemplating the painting on its wall at the foundation, Barnes would have realized, at least intuitively, that the piercing of the painted surface in the new mural, however notional, risked contradicting the virtues of “design” he held so dear. His “Art in Painting” had inveighed against effects “of depth and solidity by tricks of perspective,” which were sure to yield “a specious unreality, more unreal than a frank two-dimensional pattern.” And that was a pretty good description of the entire 500-year tradition of mural painting that Matisse had channeled.

Barnes kept the drapes closed on the windows that gave views onto the garden beyond Matisse’s piece.

An excerpt from “The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream” by Blake Gopnik, © 2025, published by Ecco at HarperCollins on March 18.