Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916 (MoMA)
Key points:
- With its austere geometries and structured sense of balance, The Piano Lesson is sometimes seen as Matisse’s answer to Cubism.
- The composition opposes the sensual, suggested by the sculpture in the left foreground, to discipline and order, implied by the geometric image of a woman in the upper right.
- This painting could serve as an allegory on art making, which requires balance between emotional expression and intellectual understanding.
Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 212.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
This highly abstract painting is important because of its relation to the Cubist grid developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, because of its biographical aspects, and especially due to its thoughtful iconography (symbolic content).
A nostalgic image
This large flat gray painting can be a bit confusing at first. Let’s begin with the boy in the lower right. He is the artist’s son, Pierre Matisse, who grows up to become a famous art dealer in New York in the 1940s. It’s worth remembering that 1916 was during world war one, the most devastating conflict Europe had yet known. When Henri painted this image, Pierre was actually mobilized. The painter did not know if his son would return. In a way then, this is a nostalgic image, Matisse has painted his son much younger then he actually was, perhaps recalling happier times. Maybe happy isn’t really the right word since Pierre looks pretty miserable. Maybe I’m just remembering my own childhood piano lessons, but his is a look of worried concentration. A portion of his face even seems to reflect that instrument of the devil, commonly known as a metronome. Pierre sits at the piano well off to the side, trapped in the house even as the open French window (a floor-to-ceiling hinged window that opens onto a wrought iron railing) beckons. Finally, what is that very abstract truncated triangle of green? Often it is interpreted as ray of sun reaching across the lawn outside.
Detail, Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 212.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
Detail, Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 212.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
You can see why poor little Pierre is so attentive. His music teacher literally hovers above him, cold, distant, and aloof. What a wonderful contrast to the other female figure in the painting.While the teacher represents discipline through her rigid rectilinear form, the small bronze nude at the lower left is virtually all curves. This small sculpture by Matisse is meant to represent the creative spirit while the teacher represents discipline, and like two boxers between rounds, each is in her corner. But wait! Is the teacher really there? Space is so ambiguous that it is hard to tell if there is really a distant room for her to inhabit. In fact, there is not and she is not. This is Matisse’s house in the suburb Issey-les-Moulineaux and this is a wall. The “teacher” is actually a painting by Matisse titled, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), 1914 (MoMA).
Detail, Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 212.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
Matisse has transformed the original painting in order that Raynal play the part of the strict instructor, Matisse often created variations on themes that he had already treated. So, in fact, Matisse has created a painting of a painting and a painting of a sculpture. This suggests that perhaps The Piano Lesson is not only about Pierre and his childhood experiences but more importantly, the act of creation itself. Is Pierre actually a stand in for Henri? After all, music is a common metaphor for the visual arts.
A visual equivalent of music
Is Matisse then saying that art is the result of both sensual creativity (the sculpture) and strict discipline (the painting)–is the metronome that swings between the two, a mediator? And then what of the odd inclusion of the carved music stand which contains the brand of the piano, “PLEYEL” (which is read backwards as we see it)?
Detail, Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 212.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
As you can see from the later and less abstract painting Music Lesson, Matisse has removed everything that is not essential from the 1916 canvas. So why then retain these letters? And why retain the playful swirling wrought iron fence? According to Jack Flam, a leading Matisse scholar and an old instructor of mine (and by the way, not very strict nor rectilinear), Matisse wants us to read the letters from right to left and then continue to read past the music stand by jumping to the curving iron fence which he believes to be an abstract expression or visual equivalent of the music (art) that is being produced.
Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson, 1917, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 210.8 (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia)
Additional resources:
Audio on this painting from MoMA
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
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[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:01] We’re in The Museum of Modern Art, looking at a — really one of my favorite canvases by Henri Matisse, this is “The Piano Lesson,” and it dates to 1916. It’s a big, austere canvas. It’s probably one of Matisse’s most Picasso-like canvases, sort of Cubist in its severity and its use of line.
[0:23] Some art historians have seen it as Matisse really trying to, in a sense, answer Cubism.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:27] It certainly doesn’t have the sensuality of many Matisse paintings, what we usually think of when we think of Matisse.
Dr. Zucker: [0:36] As explicitly, you’re absolutely right. None of the sort of sensuous hips or nudes.
Dr. Harris: [0:41] Yeah there’s a little hints of it with the arabesques of that…
Dr. Zucker: [0:44] There is, the wrought iron. Exactly, which is of course the balustrade.
Dr. Harris: [0:48] Cast iron. Right. And on the back of a…
Dr. Zucker: [0:49] But that’s perfect, because some art historians actually see the rendering of that balustrade actually as almost a kind of written expression of music that’s being produced by Pierre Matisse, Picasso’s son, who’s at the piano.
Dr. Harris: [1:03] Matisse’s son.
Dr. Zucker: [1:04] Matisse’s son, excuse me. Did I say Picasso?
Dr. Harris: [1:05] Yes.
Dr. Zucker: [1:06] So Pierre Matisse is at the piano. This is 1960. Pierre Matisse, by the way, would grow up to be a really important gallery owner in New York, selling his father’s work, among others.
[1:15] We have a sense of a real balance in this painting, because you had mentioned the lack of sensuality, but actually if you look in the lower left corner…
Dr. Harris: [1:24] That female figure on the lower left.
Dr. Zucker: [1:26] Now, it’s not a real female figure.
Dr. Harris: [1:27] No.
Dr. Zucker: [1:27] Or I shouldn’t say real.
Dr. Harris: [1:29] A Matisse sculpture.
Dr. Zucker: [1:29] It’s a painting of a bronze sculpture by Matisse. There we have a nude, and she is curvilinear and really sensuous, and contrasted, almost as if they were boxers, from the figure on the upper right.
Dr. Harris: [1:43] Yes, who looks very strict, and reminds me of the metronome that’s directly under her.
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] In its strictness…
Dr. Harris: [1:52] In its uprightness, and strictness, and sense of discipline and order there in that figure.
Dr. Zucker: [1:59] She does hover over Pierre Matisse’s head in a kind of menacing way, doesn’t she?
Dr. Harris: [2:03] She does.
Dr. Zucker: [2:04] She’s painted, you’re right, so curve…so rectilinear rather. She’s clothed; so much in opposition of the sculpture on the other side. The metronome is in that other corner, you’re absolutely right, and that alternates between the two.
[2:16] Some art historians have suggested that this is a painting that is really about this opposition between order and structure and beauty.
Dr. Harris: [2:26] Sensuality and discipline. I can see that. Now, what about his face, do you think? Why one eye? Why is his face so Cubist?
Dr. Zucker: [2:37] I have no idea, but it actually seems to reflect the metronome, doesn’t it?
Dr. Harris: [2:41] It does, and somehow I think it speaks to me of removing this image from reality.
Dr. Zucker: [2:49] This is Matisse trying to impose some of the strict geometric formal aspects of the painting to the figure itself, so that we’re not seeing it as a literal rendering.
Dr. Harris: [2:58] I think so. And that figure in the upper right, is that really a figure there?
Dr. Zucker: [3:03] No, this is his house in Nice. That’s a wall. In fact, the woman that we’re seeing, in a sense, playing the role of the piano teacher, is actually a painting, “Woman on a High Stool”. It’s also in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Dr. Harris: [3:14] It’s really not, it…
Dr. Zucker: [3:15] It’s an allegory.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] …is what it seems, but it’s not what it seems.
Dr. Zucker: [3:19] Well, you know, Matisse is playing with levels of reality here. He often does that.
Dr. Harris: [3:23] Pierre looks out at us as though he would like to somehow escape into the pleasures of the female nude on the far left.
Dr. Zucker: [3:32] Maybe, or perhaps of the shock.
Dr. Harris: [3:34] The daylight outside.
Dr. Zucker: [3:36] You almost see the last rays of sunlight coming across the lawn in that wonderful triangle between the windows.
Dr. Harris: [3:42] Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: [3:43] It’s a pretty austere allegory about what it means to make art. In some ways I look at Pierre, and I see him as a kind of stand-in for Henri.
Dr. Harris: [3:51] For Matisse himself.
[3:51] [music]
