Judith Bernstein: The Dance (After Matisse)

One of few canvases Judith Bernstein painted in the 1990s, The Dance (After Matisse), 1993, reaches 22 feet wide and ranks as the artist’s largest of the decade.

Blending graphite and oil paint in broad gestures, the painting features two phallic figures dancing across the canvas as one of Bernstein’s “Active Shooters” appears at right.

The painting bursts with energy, creating an allegory for euphoria that remains as urgent today as ever.

It visually cites Henri Matisse’s famous Dance paintings (1909-10), reimagining the famous scene through the lens of the phallus—a symbol of power Bernstein has claimed in her work since the 1960s.

Bernstein realized the painting shortly after viewing Matisse’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

There, Matisse’s Dance paintings were reunited from the collections of MoMA and The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

In The Dance (After Matisse), Bernstein responds to Matisse’s expressive rendering of the human figure.

“While drawing the masturbatory Active Shooter series, the phalluses left the body and started dancing. I then proceeded to paint them on a large scale. I later saw Matisses’s Dancers at MoMA and I thought, “Where are their cocks?” And said, ‘I’ve got them! They’re in my mural.’ Hence, The Dance (After Matisse).”

The Dance (After Matisse) subverts the unspoken sexuality of Matisse’s composition, exploring representations of joy in the face of cultural turmoil.

Combining tongue-in-cheek humor and biting social critique, the painting sees Bernstein revisit her “Active Shooter” motif, which she first depicted in the 1980s.

As the New York art world reeled from the AIDS crisis and lasting impacts of the 1980s culture wars, Bernstein’s reflected an era where Eros, once an arbiter of love, often came to represent devastation.

The figures in Bernstein’s painting continue to dance while exposed to the “Active Shooter.”

At lower left, Bernstein’s signature appears prominently.

The artist often signs her work in this manner.

This detail evokes Bernstein’s mural-scaled Signature Piece, 1986, which she conceived to appropriate the male ego and declare her presence as an artist.

The Dance (After Matisse) holds a unique place in Bernstein’s oeuvre, representing her largest commitment to canvas in the 1990s—a decade in which the artist did not stage a single solo exhibition.

In 1974, just one year after Bernstein’s first solo show, the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum famously refused to display one of Bernstein’s large, phallic charcoal screw drawing despite protest by Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Louise Bourgeois and many other artists, critics, and curators.

The once-censored Horizontal, 1973, was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2023.

But the controversy lingered over Bernstein’s career for some 30 years, before a 2012 survey exhibition at the New Museum in New York reintroduced the artist’s work to broad public view.

Bernstein never wavered from her artistic vision and fearlessly continued creating large-scale work, attesting to her raw resilience and unapologetic drive as an artist.