On Art

...Its hedonist bias conceals a very hardheaded artistic temperament...

...Abstract Expressionists have helped themselves liberally to Bonnard's close-valued color and overall inflection of the picture surface...

...And without the pressure and excitement that, in Bonnard, transform a commonplace vignette into a pictorial drama of overwhelming intensity, we are left with something that is almost too comfortable, easy and sweet...

...He sought to arrest the tendency toward abstraction in order to reestablish a viable relation between the plastic and the observed—between solid painterly form and the visual data of immediate experience...

...The latter-day Impressionist, the disciple of Art Nouveau whose graphic skills placed him in the front rank of turn-of-the-century decorators, the shy bourgeois recluse who seemed to live out his life at an immeasurable distance from the turmoil of the 20th-century avant garde—all are present and visible in those great paintings of the '20s and '30s which, paradoxically, anticipate the formal and chromatic innovations of postwar abstraction while distilling the essence of 19th-century naturalism...

...And the younger figurative painters look to him for the conviction with which he sustained his attention to a few favored subjects and elevated them to the highest level of pictorial art...

...the quality that prompted Giacometti to refer, on a famous occasion, to Bonnard's "violence"—this is what seems especially lacking in Vuillard as we confront him in this exhibition...

...It is true that Derain turned his back on modernism in the aftermath of World War I, but he was by no means unique among the important artists of his generation in questioning the assumptions of the prewar avant garde...

...I can conceive of exhibitions by both Vuillard and Derain that would have a similar effect, but those currently to be seen in New York somehow fall short in important respects...

...But the pictures Derain produced in attempting to realize this ideal cannot be dismissed, for among them are some of the most dazzling performances in 20thcentury painting...

...It was Derain's distinction to make that skepticism, together with its corollary search for a usable tradition, the basis of his late work...

...Hence, what one sees in the exhibition at the Modern, which traces the artist's development from 1891, when he was 24, to 1946, the year before he died, is the unique case of a modern painter whose mature work embraces rather than repudiates the received ideas of his youth...

...For the moment, however, let us tum to the large and much-postponed Bonnard show, and give some glancing attention to both Vuillard and Derain— painters who, in any leaner season, would earn our undivided attention...

...One returns to this exhibition expecting a familiar pleasure, and one stays to marvel yet again at the immense intelligence and conviction which this retiring, self-effacing artist sustained against the historical current...

...It was Bonnard's distinction to retain the surface felicities of Impressionism while at the same time creating an art that met the more specialized —more abstract—formal demands of his own time...

...The '20s, after all, saw such vanguard stalwarts as Picasso and Stravinsky going through their so-called "Neo-Classic" periods, and it was at that time, too, that Eliot and Valéry filled their critical writings with references to "tradition" and skepticism about modernist change...

...The strengths that carried Bonnard through all the vagaries of taste and reputation in our faithless century still have the power to shock...

...And his success in this twofold venture, which unites a kind of 19th-century fidelity to observed experience with a 20th-century commitment to abstract form, is traceable in part to his unique historical position...

...Now all that has changed...

...But the beauty of Bonnard's world is not quite as easy as it looks at first glance...

...The Derain exhibition is an altogether different phenomenon...

...The two principal styles contemporaneous with Bonnard's—that of Matisse, which projected an art of flat, unbroken areas of color deriving from Gauguin, and that of Picasso and Braque, which apotheosized the plastic component of Cézanne in the pure conceptualism of Cubism— both relegated this Impressionist manner to the historical past...

...The enclosed world of his pictures embodies a perfect daydream of beauty and delight...

...Bonnard's career begins in the '90s when the art of the Impressionists, who were his friends, was giving way to the flatter, more decorative Symbolist style of Gauguin, whose ideas deeply affected the young artist and formed the basis of his early practice...

...The movement, in Bonnard's youth, was away from the Impressionist heritage, away from its color-oriented naturalism and its rich surface orchestration of myriad visible brushstrokes woven into vivid, recognizable scenes of the familiar world...

...Bonnard's art is of a kind easy to like but difficult to explain...

...Painters who specialize in optical sensation at the expense of every other expressive device have likewise availed themselves of Bonnard's courageous inventions in this realm...

...Settlement of the complicated legal morass into which the artist's estate fell in the years following his death has permitted the showing of some unfamiliar pictures that had remained in his own possession...

...The exhibition at the Modern is altogether equal to the position Bonnard now occupies...

...But in an exhibition of this sort, consisting of 83 paintings in addition to drawings and prints, even the most familiar Bonnards, such as the Modern's own beautiful Breakfast Room (c...

...The audacity that underlay Bonnard's unique achievement was for many years slighted by the more vocal protagonists of the avant garde...

...But the note of vehemence that is always evident in Bonnard, especially in his use of color...

...With Pierre Bonnard at the Museum of Modern Art, Edouard Vuillard at Wildenstein's, André Derain at Hirschl & Adler's, David Smith at the Marlborough Gallery, Alexander Calder at the Guggenheim Museum, and a full-scale survey of Max Beckmann awaiting us in the weeks to come (not to mention the Hopper show at the Whitney, discussed here October 12), the New York art scene has opened this fall with an almost spendthrift array of major events...

...But to say this, or only this, is to make a caricature of a significant and poignant career...

...Derain needs to be shown at his strongest, or not at all...

...The trouble with the exhibition at Hirschl & Adler's is not that it shows us an uninteresting artist, but that it fails utterly to discriminate between his best and his worst work...

...The more one examines his work, the more its air of leisure, relaxation, and delicious languor discloses itself as a kind of camouflage behind which a formal and analytical intelligence of extreme and vehement rigor submits every particle of experience to the most exacting visual metamorphosis...

...The unfortunate effect of so indifferent a selection of his oeuvre is to confirm the artist's defects while blurring his true strengths...

...In pursuit of this revitalization of tradition, certain figures out of the past—Courbet and Corot, Renoir and Cézanne and Caravaggio—came more and more to represent the ideal, and the work of his own contemporaries lost all relevance for him...

...Artists of nearly every persuasion find something to admire—something to use—in his work...

...The tendency was to honor the painter as an exceptionally gifted practitioner of a retrograde style that had long been lacking in contemporary relevance...

...He is, then, an artist operating with immense skill and daring on two levels at the same time...

...With the possible exception of Matisse, no other painter of this century currently enjoys an esteem comparable to Bonnard's among both the general public and the divided, factional world of the artists themselves...

...The Vuillard show at Wildenstein's contains a number of fine, mostly early pictures, and their virtues are not unlike Bonnard's—the two painters were close friends, and their artistic commitments were in many ways the same...

...It is easy enough to mock an ambition so patently out of sympathy with the times—and critics have certainly not hesitated to do so...

...What seems so effortless and fortuitous, so naturally "given," in Bonnard's painting is actually the product of one of the most fastidious minds in modern art...

...The large public that has come to regard French painting from the advent of Impressionism to the death of Matisse as the virtual equivalent of an earthly paradise—a pure universe of luxe, calme et volupté—thus recognizes in Bonnard's painting the very essence of what it finds most pleasurable in the esthetic encounter...

...It is customary to say of Derain that, after a brilliant start in the Fauvist circle of Matisse and a mild flirtation with Cubism in the years preceding World War I, he turned himself into an artistic reactionary and spent the last decades of his life (he died in 1954) pursuing the phantoms of the past...

...1930-31), take on a renewed vigor when seen against a lifetime of sustained vision...

...There is, in fact, something devious, or at least mysterious, in Bonnard's style...

...Everything about it bespeaks charm, pleasure, physical delectation...

...As the Smith show will be the subject of a subsequent column, suffice to say here that it is one of the greatest exhibitions ever mounted by an American sculptor, and confirms this artist as an international figure of the first importance...

...Its beguiling and commodious subjects —the landscape of Southern France, the elegant bourgeois interiors belonging to his family and his friends, the breakfast table and the boudoir, fruits and flowers and household pets and bathers in the nude—are rendered with a hedonist affection that makes them immediately accessible even to indifferent or untutored eyes...