?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
HENRI MATISSE La Danse.
Color aquatint, 1935-36. 236x740 mm; 9 1/4x29 1/8 inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 50, with color variations including lighter pinks and grays and a different blue color than the published edition. One of 10 épreuves d'artiste cited by Duthuit. Signed and inscribed "Etat" in pencil, lower right. A very good, richly inked impression of this large, important print with fresh colors.
La Danse is based on Matisse's maquette for one of the preliminary iterations of the famed three-panel mural commissioned by Albert C. Barnes in 1930 (and completed in 1933). Barnes was an avid Matisse collector and had already acquired a large and important group of his works when Matisse visited Barnes at his home (and the Foundation's original location) in Merion, Pennsylvania, in 1930.
Matisse agreed to the commission despite hesitation due to the sheer scale of the project. Interestingly, while working on the mural, Matisse used painted sheets of paper (a precursor to his eventual use of cut-outs as a technique in and of itself) as they allowed him to make edits to his composition with greater ease. The final version of the Danse mural is quite similar to the current lot, with one major exception being the portrayal of eight figures instead of six. The painted mural is now installed at the newly constructed Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia. Duthuit 247.
