Bonnard and modernism

...The eerily lit scene is domestic, private, and stylized, with objects in the room barely sketched in except as interruptions of the dominant yellow tones...

...The pictures, he complained, "seduce us with their luxury, the paradoxical ease and measure of their shallow and airless depths...

...Much earlier, in canvases like The Bathroom Mirror (1908), The Mantelpiece (1916), and the The Café 'Au Petit Poucet' (1928), Bonnard had used mirrors as a way of partitioning the picture plane to show the complexity of our visual field...

...Vertical separations turn the painting into a kind of triptych...

...Nothing was predictable for the crowds that jammed the Bonnard retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) this summer...

...The bath pictures of Marthe and the harrowing self-portraits that follow are nothing if not an intense final vision...

...In The Mantelpiece this becomes even more complex: behind the nude in the mirror, seated with her head thrust back, we see a painted nude by his friend Maurice Denis, highly stylized and stretched out at full length, in exactly the posture Bonnard would later use for the bath images...

...Even in the bath pictures, Marthe's watery figure has a dissolving presence, reflecting the vivid color and light of the surrounding tiles...

...In The Open Window and Door Opening onto the Garden, we small daubs of color that represent a highly stylized landscape, surrounded by large interior panels, with their contrasting colors and contours, that frame the landscape with angular, abstract, man-made forms...

...This later Bonnard did not have the expansive talent for assimilating everything he saw, but rather a profound and ever-deepening grasp of the problems of visual perception...

...The two previous surveys of his work at MoMA (in 1948 and 1964) are but a dim memory...

...In the first of these paintings, a milestone in Bonnard's work, there is still a naturalistic sense of indoors and outdoors, but the later ones are more like color-field paintings, subsuming realistic details into color-saturated elements of an abstract pattern...

...The big Mondrian exhibition two years ago was a revelation, shedding new light on how his art developed...

...As Marthe developed an intense aversion to other people, their life together grew more confined, even reclusive, and his work began to focus on a few motifs—the dining room, the bathroom, the table overlooking the garden, the rooftops of the town they lived in...

...But did we really need a big show focused on Picasso's portraits...

...She appears in some 384 of his paintings...

...Sensuousness, paint quality, color, and an original approach to composition are all present...

...Rather than lacking "some final intensity," Bonnard's colors make a tremendous demand on the viewer's eye as the painter interrogates the medium in which he works...

...The Impressionists, the great modernists like Picasso and Matisse, and a few postwar New York painters will always draw a crowd, but these shows provide occasions to revisit the familiar and see widely scattered works brought together...

...In another his face is in shadow, his head and upper body gaunt, stooped, and hairless—the look of a dying man...

...Parts of figures—hands, legs—intrude into the edge of the frame as if the image were badly cropped or carelessly assembled...

...This surface is "made up of a myriad of small touches which defy pigmentary analysis in their complexity," in the words of Nicholas Watkins...

...In one of them his eyes are almondshaped pits of darkness...

...He loves juxtaposing the indoor and outdoor worlds, with their sharply diverging color, light, and density of detail...

...Sometimes the figures around the table are barely sketched in, as if caught in a fugitive glimpse...

...As long as abstraction remained the cardinal tenet of modernism, Bonnard's art could not be fully appreciated or even understood...

...Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was hardly a favorite of American collectors...

...Plagued by ill health, increasingly fearful and suspicious, Marthe spent hours each day washing and soaking in the tub...

...But where the Impressionists, with their love of open-air settings and leisure activities, captivate us with their rich palette, Bonnard deploys color more independently, creating an enigmatic surface that draws you back to the painting again and again...

...And as the bathroom became the center of her world, it also became the scene of Bonnard's claustral, frighteningly intimate, yet also curiously detached vision of her...

...During World War I Bonnard had gone through an artistic crisis that would inaugurate the major phase of his career...

...The MoMA show included a few of the best examples of Bonnard's early imitations of Gauguin, such as Intimacy (1891) and The Croquet Game (1892), but Bonnard's work did not come into its own until after 1893, when he began a strange love affair with a woman who called DISSENT / Winter 1999 95 herself Marthe de Meligny...

...ALL His life Bonnard had been preparing the tools and the visual language that would enable him to look squarely at his own physical decline...

...Bonnard's nudes display little of the lushness of the skin tones of Renoir's women...

...they worshipped Gauguin, and especially admired how he, like the Japanese, distributed blocks of color across a flat surface...

...Far from emphasizing perspective or depth, Bonnard will pull these elements right up to the picture plane, as he does in such masterful works as The Dining Room in the Country (1913), The Open Window (1921), and Door Opening onto the Garden (1924...

...in the bath pictures she becomes an ageless but delicate figure within a tomblike sarcophagus, evoking at once a memory of intimacy and an intimation of mortality...

...just another neo-impressionist, a decadent...

...After these mirror paintings, Bonnard's favorite device for achieving this double vision was through his striking images of a window or doorway looking out onto a bit of landscape...

...also taste and erudition...

...Even Greenberg noted shrewdly that "Bonnard's limp, deliberately 'accidental' composition is reponsible for some of his best effects...

...Their confined life purified his work down to a few essential experiments in representation...

...Bonnard is almost a major painter, but not quite," he wrote...

...There is never any narrative occasion in Bonnard's later paintings...

...These too were bathroom images, with his head surrounded by the refracted color of the walls and tiles like some Byzantine icon...

...The severe limitations of his life with Marthe became the workshop, the crucible, in which he explored certain "adventures of the optic nerve," as he called them...

...In the latter, only a slight deepening and darkening of the skin sets off the yellow figure from the rich yellow walls and floor that surround her...

...He discovered that "color has just as strong a logic as form...

...In his review of the 1948 MoMA retrospective, Clement Greenberg defended his more severe view of art against the seduction he acutely felt...

...The tricky café painting sets the "real" interior space of the café, on the left, alongside the outdoor tables and sketchy figures reflected in the plate-glass window...

...As some details of their extremely private relationship have become known over the past thirty years, bits and pieces of drama have attached themselves to the mysterious imagery of Bonnard's late paintings, especially those of Marthe in the bathroom or in the bath itself...

...they seem to be on different planets, or at least in different paintings...

...The ostensible subject simply becomes the occasion for an experiment in form and a typically modern investigation of color and vision...

...He teaches English at the City University of New York Graduate Center...

...the major drama is not anecdotal but in how he apportions the surface of the canvas, making the human presence peripheral to the window on the garden, the bowl of fruit on the table, the pattern or color of the tablecloth, often tilted upward toward the flat picture plane...

...Part of the scandal of Bonnard's paintings 94 DISSENT / Winter 1999 is the pleasure they give...

...At their best, however, they reconfigure an artist's work into a superbly illustrated visual essay...

...Despite Picasso's complaint about Bonnard's failure to transcend IN LINE with his emphasis on color and on the flatness of the picture plane, Bonnard's draughtsmanship is often deliberately crude, primitive...

...He violates the laws of perspective as deliberately, though not as obtrusively, as the Cubists...

...In The Bathroom Mirror, the washstand with its rounded pitcher and bowl dominates the foreground, but the mirror image hangs above it like a video screen or a painting within a painting...

...The mantelpiece becomes an altarpiece consecrated to these contrasting images...

...This interior light, with its eerie color patterns, creates an unearthly, visionary effect, more like a mosaic than a painting...

...Instead of forming a ground for the objects resting on them, these whites, which are blindingly intense, seem almost to hover above the surface as they link up with bolts of whiteness elsewhere in the work...

...MORRIS DICKSTEIN edited The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, just published by Duke University Press...

...Bonnard's fellow Nabi Maurice Denis remarked: "Remember that a painting— before being a battle horse, a nude woman or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order...

...Unlike the London version of this exhibit, which unfolded chronologically, the curators at MoMA hung Bonnard's later paintings by subject—landscapes, nudes, bath paintings, self-portraits—heightening the obsessive, biographical elements of the story...

...If Picasso is a vast continent, it has by now been thoroughly mapped and explored...

...In his early paintings Bonnard had often portrayed Marthe in poses out of classical sculpture...

...He began as a painter of the urban scene, an observer of social life...

...No modern novel could be more preoccupied with point of view than Bonnard's canvases...

...As if he were analyzing the stages of modern art in a single canvas, Bonnard will bring together a geometrical interior, dominated by the panels of a door, the frame of the window, the shape of a table, with a piece of Impressionist landscape that is simply a riot of light and color...

...Bonnard's experiments with perception can best be seen in his play with mirrors, with the surfaces of tables, or in his repeated juxtaposition of indoor and outdoor scenes...

...At MoMA, viewers were drawn back not only by the visual surface of Bonnard's paintings but by a perceptible shadow of the life histories behind them...

...His name did not even appear in some standard texts, such as H.W...

...The Nabis' aim was to make painting more decorative, less formal and easel-bound, more intimately linked to daily life...

...As Marthe withdrew into her moist indoor world, he converted it into a scene of elemental beauty and sadness, a long farewell, just as he turned his late self-portraits into an unsparing meditation on his own physical decay...

...By ending the show with these images of Marthe submerged and Bonnard in decline, the museum provided a strong conclusion to what was at once the story of a life and the history of a creative adventure...

...His Large Blue Nude of 1924 and especially his Large Yellow Nude of 1931 are almost monochromatic...

...But some final intensity is missing...

...In the 1890s Bonnard belonged to a group of young painters who called themselves Nabis, after the Hebrew word for prophets...

...In this almost medieval fashion, Bonnard anticipated the proliferation of images in our media culture, the quick transitions and dizzying contrasts that fill up our visual field...

...His figures can be highly simplified, even childish, and his compositions often seem as casual as an amateur snapshot...

...If this doesn't fit well into the standard chronicle of modern art, perhaps that account still needs to be revised...

...Instead of accepting the fiction that a painter can actually observe himself, Bonnard situates his 96 DISSENT / Winter 1999 self-portraits in the viewpoint of someone examining himself in a bathroom mirror, complete with shaving equipment in the foreground...

...In Bonnard's last painting, the great Almond Tree in Blossom (19461947), the white swatches of blossoms really do seem to lift off the canvas in great bursts, a perfect apotheosis of luminous white...

...With his face in shadow, his eyes like vacant apertures on eternity, he is a man wryly assimilating his own cadaverous appearance, his impending nonbeing...

...Sometimes they are little more than tourist packages aimed at the box office...

...Figure and ground form a continuum along the flat surface of the canvas...

...In the work of his last decades, the formal and the personal come together around the handful of subjects highlighted by the MoMA exhibition...

...This bifocal pattern would recur more starkly in Bonnard's later work...

...Over the next fifty years she would be his mistress, his muse, his jailer, his sick and reclusive charge, and his endlessly rediscovered model and inspiration...

...After he saw a huge exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books in 1890, Bonnard realized "that color could express everything . . . with no need for relief or texture...

...Picasso himself told Francoise Gilot that Bonnard was "not really a modern painter...

...Seeking a new approach to form, he began drawing intensively as he questioned his old intoxication with color...

...Janson's 1962 History of Art...

...Visitors were enthralled by it...

...By highlighting these problems of perception, with their fascinating repetitions and variations, the MoMA show became a visual essay on Bonnard's modernity, as if in response to Greenberg's charge that "some final intensity is missing" from his work...

...Picasso called it "a potpourri of indecision" and compared it unfavorably to the color in Matisse and van Gogh, who he felt were far less subservient to nature...

...In the background she sits on the bed pensively, almost withdrawn, while he stands in the foreground, turning away...

...For most viewers, Bonnard's color is the key to his sensuous appeal...

...There was a palpable sense of enjoyment at the Bonnard show...

...Typically, Bonnard relies on color rather than line to give shape and texture to objects...

...one painter I met was there for the fourth time...

...98 DISSENT / Winter 1999...

...they were put together at a time when he was widely seen as a belated Impressionist, an artist clinging to techniques that were dated by the turn of the century, or as a minor modernist, not as bold as Matisse in his use of color or as daring as the Cubists in his break with nature and figuration...

...He never fit easily into any narrative of modern art, yet he influenced painters as different as Fairfield Porter and Mark Rothko...

...Bonnard's tabletops became yet another motif through which he explored the impressive effects of pure color and shape, including the checkered red and white tablecloth in CofDISSENT / Winter 1999 97 fee (1915), which dominates the painting, despite the woman and dog sketched in beside it, and the brilliant white surfaces of The Table (1925) and The White Tablecloth (1926...

...Nicholas Watkins's engrossing new book, Interpreting Bonnard: Color and Light (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), stresses his explorations of color and perception, while Timothy Hyman's fine Bonnard (Thomas and Hudson) emphasizes some of the obscure personal sources of his visual experiments...

...DESPITE Picasso's denial and Greenberg's misgivings, we can now see Bonnard as a thoroughly modern painter, a restless, original, and highly selfconscious artist...

...Rather than rejecting abstraction, Bonnard meets it halfway, appending his human subjects to a strong formal pattern...

...Far from being a retrograde painter stuck with old techniques, Bonnard carved out a space between Impressionism and modernism, between the intimate portrayal of domestic subjects and the expressive potential of saturated color and abstract design...

...Her presence in this show begins with the provocative erotic poses in Indolence and Siesta and the postcoital sadness of Man and Woman in which we see two naked lovers separated by a screen...

...Even as he withdrew to the country, as his world grew narrower, he used everyday life to probe the conditions of painting itself...

...the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new one...