MoMA with Jeff: Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916.

Henri Matisse came to art a little later in his 84 years, in 1889, at the age of eighteen, when his mother gave him a box of paints to help him while away the hours of convalescence after a bout with appendicitis. He was said to have 'discovered paradise' in that box, and given the stunning breadth of his contribution to the art world, that is difficult to argue.

He fast became a student of the world, studying in Paris, reveling in the neoclassicists like Poussin and Flandrin, but traveling throughout Europe where he would encounter John Peter Russell in Brittany and discover the Impressionism ironically born in his own backyard at home. His works are influenced by perhaps a wider array of 19th Century European painters than any of his contemporaries, Turner, Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin. Braque, Pissarro, Picasso, among others can all be seen in his evolution. And while his blurring the line between painting and sculpture might be seen as his most significant artistic advancement, it is his color theory and nod to the Japanese printmakers that were making a mark in France at the time that speak loudest to me.

He is well represented at MoMA. And I chose his Piano Lesson to speak of today.

Painted in 1916, Matisse had already earned himself a seat at the head of the table of the Fauvists, the 'beasts,' for their nearly heretical adaptation of the color wheel. The abstraction of color was one step ahead of the abstraction of form, perhaps, but no one was ahead of Matisse on both fronts.

The painting here is a study of time. And in its execution, Matisse painted in great detail the great room of his home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb just slightly southwest of the heart of Paris. But then he began to scrape away the minutiae leaving only the barest essentials, splashing swaths of color to bear the weight of lost detail. The result is highly emotional, fractured, nearly Cubist, and telling. Because it is also a painting of light, or more accurately, the passing of light, the measurement by which essentially we tell time.

At the piano sits Matisse's son Pierre, younger than he would have been in 1916, as World War I raged and Pierre himself was already conscripted and awaiting orders. Here, instead, he practices, grimly, with the plodding metronome echoed on his face and then extended outward beyond the lovely French windows and their scrolled grille-work as the sun angles itself off the empty sumptuous lawn for the night, sundials everywhere.

Matisse references himself on the canvas with a rendering of his bronze reclining woman in the lower left, and looming like a stern piano teacher over Pierre's shoulder, Matisse's Woman on a High Stool. They are his contributions to immortality. These objets d'art and his son. And therein lies the secret of this painting for me.

Imagine if you can (or remember if you will) awaiting orders for your son to go off to a war from which the wrong fraction returned, from which a worse fraction returned scarred for life, your son, set to leave the safety of your gaze, at any age, your heart wandering outside of yourself, anywhere, really, but if you can, on a battlefield, and imagine then, trying to decipher time, to fracture it into photons, to fragment every possible moment before your heart might break and you are plunged into the gray that haunts this painting on the periphery like the very coldest shadow in the valley of death. I think that is what Matisse is up to here. He would rather the pissy look on his son's face, stuck at the piano and stealing a wickedly mean glance back at him while the joys of the lawn squander themselves outside and alone, yes, he would rather suffer the silly petty hatred of his littler boy for eternity, than offer him up to a bullet in the blink of an eye.

So, the father surrounds his son with beloved objects in the heart of his home, sets him younger and lower on a bench, as simply as possible, safe, behind a massive piece of furniture, making music until time plays itself out, and all the clocks stop, forever.