The Piano Lesson
1916 The Museum of Modern Art
About this artwork
This large-scale oil painting depicts the artist's son Pierre practicing the piano in a simplified, geometric interior. It reflects Matisse's experimentations with Cubist principles of abstraction and structural reduction.
Did you know?
While often categorized as an exploration of Cubism, this painting was actually created in Matisse's home studio during the peak of World War I. The artist used a process of constant editing and scraping down paint layers, which he documented photographically to track the work's evolution from a highly detailed scene to the final, starkly abstract composition.
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The Piano Lesson
Henri Matisse, 1916
