Commissioned in 1909 by a wealthy Russian businessman to adorn the staircase of his mansion, at first glance The Dance might appear the apotheosis of rhythmic delight and synchronised levity. But the eerie apricot tinge of the five ecstatic nudes, who seem to have subsumed into their very being the armageddon orange of Munch’s work, is a tip-off that something more complex and perilous is at play. The two dancers who stretch the foreground of the work have lost their grip on each other’s hands, as the one closest to us begins slipping to the ground. Her left foot is already sliding out of view. Far from depicting untroubled joy, Matisse’s carefully choreographed masterpiece teeters on cosmic disaster. The very rotation of the world is left dangerously in doubt.

Amber alert

Munch and Matisse set the tone, as it were, for the portentous temperament of orange in modern and contemporary art. Throughout the 20th Century, the ominous refulgence of orange will find itself refracted variously in the works of everyone from Francis Bacon, where it sets the sinister scene for the disturbing Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), as well as Rene Magritte’s Art of Living (1967), where the colour inflates itself to popping point as a surreal cranium. The syncopated pigments and shudders of Rhythm, joy of life, painted in 1931, is characteristic of how crucial orange is to the work and imagination of the Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delauney, who once protested: “You know I don’t like orange”. Like it or not, orange is frequently the heat that holds together – while threatening to break apart – the visual music of her sinuous mosaics.