Henri Matisse, to the wonderment of all who cherish dance, captured movement in static forms. A figure is never truly inert, but caught like an animal in a trap in a state of stalled action or — and this is where it gets tricky, in a dancer’s sixth-sense way — anticipating it. In his drawings, his paintings and his sculptures, it’s not so much about what you glean from the surface, but the vitality that you sense underneath it: the flow of blood, the painstaking expansion and contraction of muscles and the tension of a tendon that propels a body into motion.

The Matisse we are all most familiar with is the Matisse who, when he isn’t drawing dancers, is drawing movement. With obvious ties to the art form, that relationship to dance is evident in his early, important Le bonheur de vivre, 1905–06, in which he transforms a canvas into something of a stage. From the trees to the bodies, the landscape is a complex, theatrical arrangement of curving, sensual movement and vibrant color —from the apricot earth and the rose-toned bodies in the foreground to the abundant burnt auburn leaves and the red accents that outline pale flesh.

In 1908, two years before Matisse turned his focus solely to the now famous ring of dance in Le bonheur de vivre in his series of Dance paintings, he wrote about the female form in Notes of a Painter: "Suppose I want to paint a woman's body: first of all I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image, which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human."

The essence of the human form is the key to much of his art, and in his Dance works, Matisse renders the background more simply, more starkly to emphasize it. Here, the earth and the sky, green and blue, have no details; it’s neither reality nor fantasy, but a place more untouchable that conjures the "Somewhere Ballet" of Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story. Matisse’s dancers are somewhere else, and within this enclosed space of the body and the mind, they move with abandon.