Matisse (also) designed a ballet. You can watch it at PMA.

Henri Matisse escaped a career nadir through the power of dance and concluded a decade of reinvigoration by designing his own ballet. Now, for the first time in decades, and thanks to the collaboration of two local artistic siblings, Philadelphians can see this transformative work again.

Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Matisse in 1930s” is filled with the legendary artist’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures. But what ties it all together is a 1939 ballet for which he designed costumes and scenery, called Rouge et Noir, says Matthew Affron, the museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art.

A filmed version of the ballet, set to a recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra, closes the PMA’s show.

Bringing the film back to life was a challenging effort and a passion project for both Affron and his sister, Beatrice Jona Affron — music director and conductor of Philadelphia Ballet. Matthew Affron found silent film footage of Rouge et Noir while researching Ann Barzel’s archives at Chicago’s Newberry Library. Barzel, a dance critic, recorded short movies of companies that performed at the city’s Auditorium Theatre ― including seven minutes of the Ballet de Monte Carlo performing the Matisse-designed ballet in 1949.

Recognizing that the film was a treasure, Matthew shared it with Beatrice Jona, asking whether it was possible to sync the dance with its original score, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1.

Working with the film proved challenging because it had no markers for where music should occur. The excerpts were not arranged in chronological order, and were sped up. Beatrice Jona slowed down the timing until the dancers had a “naturalistic human tempo.”

She also reached out to choreographer Lorca Massine ― the son of Rouge et Noir’s choreographer, Léonide Massine ― to learn if he might offer any guidance. But because he did not know much about the ballet, “he gave us permission to think creatively and do with it as we thought,” she said.

Léonide Massine is probably best known to American audiences as the shoemaker from the movie The Red Shoes. After observing his dance style and referencing two excerpts from each of Shostakovich’s four movements for Symphony No. 1, Beatrice Jona “followed my own bent in terms of highlighting what I’ve found to be the most interesting musical moments.”

Recognizing that this is “a very Philadelphia project,” she selected a recording of the symphony, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the helm of former-maestro Eugene Ormandy in 1963, to accompany the film.

Matthew Affron sees this project as the star of the exhibition, and has set the film as a 30-foot-wide projection in its own viewing gallery as the concluding coup de théâtre of “Matisse in the 1930s.”

“Because you can see the film from a gallery and a half ahead, it draws people through space and propels them through the installation,” he said. Once they see the film, visitors “are not just walking by” or treating it as a perfunctory piece to politely observe ― rather “they are sitting and watching,” changing positions, and rewatching it more than once from different angles.

When developing Rouge et Noir’s scenario, Matisse created a set of boldly colored paper cutouts to stand in for the dancers, as well as a mock-up for his set, which referenced the arches of the Barnes Foundation. Within the film, visitors will notice these arches clearly as backdrop.

Less discernible are the bold colors of the costumes or that Matisse had his paper cutouts sewn directly onto them. Matthew Affron has included some of these paper cutout studies within the exhibition.

Even by modern standards, Massine’s choreography is extremely athletic and difficult. Far from visions of fairies or princesses, he shifted between tableaus of angular shapes and high-kicking and twirling bodies at war with one another. All of this while the star-crossed leading couple (Massine’s star ballerina Alicia Markova as Woman and André Eglevsky as Man) executed high flying lifts and struggled to wade through the surrounding carnage.

“Man, symbolizing the poetic spirit, is pursued and overtaken by evil forces. ... Woman parted from man is tormented in her solitude by an evil spirit,” reads a synopsis quoted in a New York Times review from 1948.

At the time of its premiere, Matthew Affron said critics thought Rouge et Noir was an allegory for the then-coming world war. Though that political perspective largely defined the ballet, its synopsis focused on the struggles between good and evil.

He says that the dance film is integral to the exhibition because Matisse loved dance and populated his works with dance themes.

Affron mentions The Joy of Life’s arrangement of people living in harmony with nature (in residence at the Barnes Foundation) as well as the circle of dancers in Dance I, Dance, (at MOMA, New York, and Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, respectively), and the triptych panel Dance II, which Matisse created for the Barnes Foundation in 1932.

“The point of having the film of the Massine collaboration,” Affron explains, “is that the Barnes Dance drew on his earlier Dance images. [It] was a turning point at the beginning of the ‘30s for his art, clearly animated his creative imagination at the end of the ‘30s, and continued to influence his work afterwards.”

In keeping with Matisse’s still revolutionary vision, Affron said that his colleagues in public programs have enlisted the choreographer Kyle Marshall to make a new dance that responds to “Matisse in the 1930s.” That piece is titled Ruin and will premiere in the Great Stair Hall of PMA on Jan. 20. Until then, fans of dance, music, art, and collaboration can continue to establish their own diaogue with Matisse’s balance of still and dynamic forces for themselves.

“Ruin” will be performed at PMA Jan. 20-22. https://philamuseum.org/calendar/event-series/ruin-dance-performance

“Matisse in the 1930s” runs at the Art Museum through Jan. 29. https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/matisse