The Neva was still covered in a thick layer of ice in March. Skaters whirled out in the middle of the wide river on which St Petersburg stands. Cold, somber sunlight filtered into the gallery high above. And that was when I saw them for the first time, the red bodies whirling and yet still, linking hands, looking downward as they cycle in the blue: the dancers.
There in that wintry room in Russia's great museum, the State Hermitage, was the most beautiful painting of the modern world. There is an unreal and utopian quality to Henri Matisse's Dance. And its strange story has recently become stranger still. The painting, completed in 1910, was confiscated from its Russian owner after the 1917 revolution and vanished. It was nearly destroyed for being decadent during the Stalin era, eventually became visible to Westerners after the downfall of the Soviet Union and, in the past few weeks, has been at the center of a Cold War-style diplomatic drama.
The painting was set to be the star of an exhibition of modern masterpieces, From Russia, at the Royal Academy later this month. Then, last month, the show was abruptly cancelled. Russia took fright that paintings taken into state ownership after the revolution had no protection from legal seizure in Britain. Only fast-tracked, anti-seizure legislation has saved the show.
Matisse's masterpiece is the most glorious work of art the British will see in the capital this year. Savage and classical, ancient and modern, civilized and barbaric: Dance is all these things. Its beauty comes from a time and a place when art was being remade.
Matisse's five dancers are outlined in thick brown lines that notate simple anatomical details - breasts, buttocks, leg muscles - in a deliberately gauche and childish way. A foot at the far left of the picture is a tangled blur; and what's that bungled attempt to delineate the stomach of the dancer at top right? Yet no one can seriously mistake the roughness of Matisse's drawing for incompetence. The masculine-looking dancer at the left edge forms a perfect geometric curve. Matisse does everything he can to tie his ethereal imagination to basic physical facts. One dancer throws her head forward over a twisted, bulging stomach and muscular, wide-flung thighs. The rawness of her physique releases the painting's sheer visceral power. It's hard to miss the fact that she resembles some tribal carving or neolithic fertility idol. This painting reconnects jaded modern eyes with the primal origins of art.
It is nearly 4m wide and 2.5m tall in only three colors: blue, green and red. Matisse is one of the greatest liberators of color in the history of art and here he puts color at the service of a great revolt.
In the first decade of the 20th century, any adult - including Matisse, born in 1869 - would have grown up in the Victorian age. Even in Paris, where artists had long made a virtue of shocking moralists, sex was disreputable. Now, suddenly, here is Matisse's Dance, a painting that declares there is no higher, no more human thing than to dance in naked ecstasy: to burn with passion.
And yet the image Matisse uses is one of the most ancient in art. From Etruscan frescoes to Botticelli's Primavera to Turner's landscapes, the story of art is full of dancers.
To compare Matisse's Dance with, say, Botticelli's Primavera is to recognize Matisse's originality and modernity. From the Primavera, the goddess Venus looks out. That gaze has a basic way of connecting painting with the world we inhabit.
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