Paris in Prints

...With conceptual artas one of its leading theoreticians and practitioners, Sol Le Witt, has put itall of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair...

...The impressionist remnant is evident in Bonnards use of scenes of P aris by day and night, indoors and out...

...Thats a shame, for it is everything a museum show ought to be: informative, delightful, and educational...

...Here, indeed, is the intimation of a modernist impulse to create an intensity of feeling by exploiting the two-dimensional surface of the print medium...

...Bonnard had something different in mind...

...Indeed, the lack of press coverage may have kept many from visiting the show...

...It is also striking to see how he and othersin illustrating books, journals, and advertising posterselevated popular and commercial art forms...

...Promenades des Nourrices, Fri^e des Fiaa^es (1895), a large four-panel color-lithographic screen, evokes the exquisite refinement and still beauty that one associates with the Japanese artists whose woodblock prints did so much to inuence the late nineteenth- century Paris avant-garde...

...In looking at Lautrecs prints, one feels oneself an observer...

...More than half the off-white paper has been left untouched, giving the print a modern unfinished look that is as appeal -ing today as it was then...

...The exhibition consists mostly of lithographs and photo-reliefs, along with a sprinkling of woodcuts, zinco-types, etchings, and aquatints...

...These images appear both at and bodied, contrived yet lifelike, socially realistic yet aesthetically pure...

...And it is striking to see the seeds of that art in these early prints...

...So far , so Steven C. Munson is a writer and painter in Washington, D.C...

...In the age of the often unmanageable blockbuster show , this is well worth remembering...

...Indeed, one can almost hear the graphic reverberations in this remarkably musical print...

...As with his four-panel screen, what strikes one first is the overall arrangement of various elements: four closely aligned squarish red dots here, three spaced-out black ovalish dots there, the scaffolding of lines, the asymmetrically blackened windows, the cluster of irregular chimney pipesthey all combine to create staccato and counterpoint effects...

...There are works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Felix Vallotton, Eduard Vuil-lard, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and others, executed in different styles and reecting different expressive purposes...

...Whatever else one may say about conceptual art, its tendency is to disparage feeling, slight the visual, and dismiss the physical qualities of a painting or a print...

...At the same time, the use of color remains basically descriptive: blue sky, green grass, yellow carriage, a womans red hair...

...Perhaps the best way to see what he was up to is to compare his prints with those of Lautrec, who is represented in the show almost as amply...

...The central imagea partial view through a window of two buildings of unequal heightis created out of two blocky interlocking L shapes, the larger resting on its back, the other fused on top of it...

...So complete is Bonnards evocation of this non-Western aestheticwith his use of large areas of empty space, his spare use of color, and his use of both patterned and calligraphic mark -ingsthat one at fi rst does not even notice the busy and humorous social scene being depicted...

...in looking at Bon-nards, one feels as though one is somehow participating in the delicate feelings they evoke...

...In reecting about such works, one cannot help thinking that the situation in Paris in the 1890s is the reverse of the situation in America today, where mere take-offs and simulations of popular and commercial art are celebrated as genuinely serious achievements...

...Take, for example, Lautrecs litho -graph Partie de campagne (1897...

...The catalogue notes that for Bon -nard and his contemporaries, music illustration was an arena for stylistic experimentation, as the artists moved from naturalist to more abstract symbolist modes...

...But the star of the show is plainly Pierre Bonnard...

...In such illustrations as Do Mi (1893), as the catalogue points out, the task of creating images that would elucidate . . . verbal explanations of musical theory . . . offered Bonnard a perfect opportunity to engage in an amusing exercise in symbolist equation of form and meaning .. . : galloping horses to convey the sense of prestissi -mo and an overweight woman to sym -bolize the whole note...

...What they have missed is proof that a museumby approaching a subject with modest aims and on a modest scalecan use its permanent collection to bring viewers to a real appreciation and understanding of the art before them...

...As the National Gallery show itself makes clear, nothing could be farther from the aesthetics of Bonnard and the turn-of-the-century Paris avant-garde...

...But then the writer attempts to link this intense activity to, of all things, the genesis of aspects of the modern aesthetics of conceptual art...

...The absence of modeling of forms is especially evident in L'Enfant la lampe (1897), Scne de famille (1893), and La Petite Blan-chisseuse (1896...

...Bonnards Le Figaro (1903) is an outstanding example of the promotional poster art of the time, not least because it shows both the kind of pictorial innovation of which he was capable and the good-natured humor with which he often seems to have approached his work...

...BY STEVEN C. MUNSON Only one false note is struck in the National Gallerys exhibition of French print-making from the late nineteenth century...

...The use of color is anti-naturalistic, but the result, strangely, is not...

...Maison dans la cour is the most abstract of the Bonnard prints on display...

...Its there in the show s catalogue, where the otherwise excellent lead essay speaks of the numerous artists, especially Bonnard, who played a dynamic role in P aris in the 1890s, illustrating books and journals and combining words and images in the design of posters, theater programs, menus, and other ephemera...

...The examples from Bonnard stand out both for their unsurpassed quality and for what one recognizes immediately upon seeing them: Here is a bridge from nineteenth-century impressionism and post-impressionism to twentieth-century modernism...

...Prints Abound: P aris in the 1890s, on view in the East Building of the National Gallery until February 25, opened in the fall to almost no notice...

...good...

...Both, too, had a marvelous sense of color...

...To see the gem-like Prints Abound: P aris in the 1890sa model of an unpoliti -cized museum exhibitionis to wish there were more like it...

...But in exploring such themes, the impressionists had sought a new kind of realism: the physical and psychological realism of Degas, or the realism of visual perception epitomized by Monet...

...Both were master draftsmen...

...Something similarly startling occurs when one looks at Maison dans la cour (1895-96...

...Locked in formal tension by an odd geometry of line and color, these prints create a mood of extreme intimacy...

...One gets an impression of receding open space in this image of a country outing...

...But in their prints they used color in different ways...

...In two other prints, Bonnard achieves even more amazing results...

...The use of this sort of geometry (along with his retention of the impressionist technique of strokes and daubs) would become a central part of Bonnards painterly art, which ranks as one of the great twentieth-century achievements...

...The L shape was used earlier by Bonnard in a series of color lithograph relief-prints he did to illustrate a children music primer...

...Unlike Lautrec, Bonnard, working early in his career and under the in uence of the Gauguin-inspired Nabi style, fashioned his print-images with broad, at areas of color . This has the effect of presenting a sensation of space rather than an illusion of space...