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An Ekphrasis Moment: Good for the Soul by Mike Coleman
An Ekphrasis Moment: Good for the Soul by Mike Coleman
Have you ever been captivated by a painting and didn't know why?
Sure, we're all drawn to the gorgeous works of the Renaissance, the vivid colors and graceful forms that retell familiar myths and Bible stories. Their beauty washes over you like golden Florentine sunlight.
But what about works that aren't so traditionally pretty? Odd works like the one here: The Piano Lesson, painted by the French artist Henri Matisse in the summer of 1916, as World War I raged in Europe and threatened his own family.
The painting captivated me the first time I saw it some years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At 8 x 7 feet, it is enormous, but it wasn't the size as much as the colors that stopped me—that pervasive gray crowding out the iridescent green and rose.
And the poor kid with the metronome stuck in his head? What the heck was that all about it? Indeed, I don't think even Michelangelo would have known what to make of this eerie painting with its nods to cubism. Neither did I the first time I saw it.
Still, I didn't want to leave MOMA that day.
It would have been like . . . I don't know, like meeting someone interesting and then walking away from them in the middle of your first conversation.
I wanted to stay.
I wanted to learn more about the painting.
But we had a schedule, and my husband, Ted, was pressing us onward.
Still, I came back to The Piano Lesson before we left the museum.
What is it about this painting? I wondered.
Standing before it with my hands in the pockets of my jeans, I started a list:
First, the colors. I understood that the gray made the other colors more striking. Made them pop.
Second, the memories. I took piano lessons when I was in grade school, when I was about the same age as this brown-haired boy appeared to be. I often practiced in the late afternoons at the upright piano in our living room while my mom fixed supper in the adjacent kitchen.
Sometimes my older sister Marsha and I played duets at that piano . . . again, usually in the late afternoon.
We were no experts by a long shot, but we could read music, and we played a mean Bring a Torch, Jeannette Isabella at Christmastime, when I’d be home from college for winter break, and Marsha would be taking a few days of vacation from her job as a stewardess with Pan Am.
I remembered the fun we had, the smell of supper cooking, the sound of Mom opening the ice trays for her and my dad's nightly cocktail when he got home from work, the fading afternoon light at the living room window signaling it was time to plug in the lights on the Christmas tree.
Did Matisse's gray, I wondered, represent the same time of day in the painting? It sure felt that way. It's always a slightly melancholy time, when the sun starts fading. Especially when you know how quickly the holidays will roll by, how the partings will be inevitable, how the everyday routine will begin again after January 1. How it will likely be another year before you tickle the ivories with your sister again.
Third, the piano. Matisse's ornate music holder isn't at all like the clean-lined Everett piano we had, but something about its swirling design, mirrored in what no doubt was a Paris apartment's wrought iron balcony railing in the lower left quadrant of the painting, reminded me of playing the piano at home.
Why, I wondered? Then it hit me: The hinged lid of our piano bench opened to reveal a shallow storage space. That's where our dad kept the music he practiced at night after we had gone to bed: old hand-me-down pieces like Debussy's Clair de Lune, Dvořák's Humoresque, Felix Arndt's bouncy Nola (which drove my mother crazy). Many of those pieces had ornate curlicues on their cover designs, curlicues that looked a lot like what Matisse had included in the painting.
In fact, the sheet music for a 1938 song titled Because, one of the few items that remain from my family's sheet music collection, bears ornamentation that uncannily echoes Matisse's spiraling lines.
With the memory of the piano bench and the music inside, another thought struck me. Dad's old sheet music had a stale, sweet smell, a smell I associated with playing the piano. And didn't that smell also evoke the faded gray and soft rose colors in the painting? Isn't that the way I might have described it if pressed to do so, say, by my creative writing professor in college. "The yellowed, crumbling paper had the gray-pink smell of old roses," I might have written. I felt certain that if Matisse's painting had an aroma, that would be it.
So, there we have memories of my sister, my mother and my father all brought to life by a single painting hanging in the MOMA.
The metronome resonates, too.
We kept a metronome on top of our piano to set the pace at which a composer wanted the music to be played. As a kid in grade school, I liked to imagine you could adjust the metronome to change the speed of time. You could slow it down over summer vacation. Speed it up the week before Christmas. All by a simple adjustment of the weight on the pendulum.
Wasn't it lovely to think about that? Like the boy in the painting, I had the metronome stuck in my head, figuratively, at least. Or, at least, a shadow of it played in my imagination. Taught me something, too: The passage of time is totally beyond our control. Here was another melancholy point this predominantly gray painting appeared to be making: Much as we'd like to, we can't stop change.
Reading more about the history of The Piano Lesson, I learned this was exactly Matisse's message.
The Piano Lesson depicts the living room of Matisse's home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, with his elder son, Pierre, at the piano. As stated on www.HenriMatisse.org, a website devoted to his work, the painting "evokes a specific moment in time—light suddenly turned on in a darkening interior—by the triangle of shadow on the boy's face and the rhyming green triangle of light falling on the garden."
There's a wealth of information online about the painting, its historic significance, its tribute to Picasso through its cubist elements, its echo of the mood in Europe during WWI. Indeed, Matisse intended to make a statement about the breaking apart of his peaceful world.
The passage of time.
The fading of light.
The transformations we all go through.
Today, more than a century after its creation, more than 50 years after I sat at our piano with the happy sounds of my boyhood home all around me, and especially now as Ted and I and our families face down the challenges that older age brings, The Piano Lesson touches me more than ever.
And fills me with gratitude for all the light there is left.
Mike Coleman is the author of The Way from Me to Us: A Memoir, published in June 2023 by Riverdale Avenue Books. The book was a finalist in Chanticleer’s 2022 Journey awards for nonfiction about overcoming adversity. Retired after a 45-year professional writing career, Coleman lives with his husband in Atlanta, Georgia.
