Pierre Bonnard: early and late

Apollo, Nov, 2003 by Jorg Zutter

When The Phillips Collection in Washington, PC, organises an exhibition of the work of Pierre Bonnard, expectations are extremely high. First, the Phillips holds the largest, oldest, and most diverse collection of Bonnard's art in the United States; second, since its very beginnings--it opened in 1918, as the Phillips Memorial Gallery--it has maintained a track record of both monographic and group exhibitions including his work. Duncan Phillips, the institution's founder, was among the first in North America to recognise the importance of Bonnard's art, and between 1925 and 1954 he accumulated a key collection of works, Early spring (1910) being one of his first acquisitions. Since the Phillips's pioneering show 'Bonnard: The Late Paintings', organised in 1984 in collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, a large number of Bonnard exhibitions have followed around the world, the most successful of them, emphasising the artist's mature and late career (and underplaying the period before 1900), being held at the Tate, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998.

Bonnard's gift for depicting the world as a sparkling symphony of vivid colours and organic surfaces appeals to a large audience, including art lovers and artists of all kinds. Indeed, a significant group of painters have paid tribute to his works' modernity. In Europe it was Matisse who ushered Bonnard into modernism, asserting that he was a 'great painter for today and assuredly for the future'. Balthus too celebrated Bonnard, reinventing his approach in the interiors, open windows, and landscapes that the younger painter executed at Chassy in the 1950s. Lately Bonnard has been recognised as a profoundly radical artist, without precedent in early modernism, in the United States as well. His painting may bask in chromatic luxury, but it is far deeper and more enigmatic than this might suggest, and exhibitions such as 'Bonnard Rothko', at the PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, in 1997, have rightly interpreted it as a precursor of Abstract Expressionism. Bonnard's influence on art of the postwar period is considerable and worldwide, easily extending to Australia, where the landscape painter William Robinson, among others, owes him a great debt, having emulated his work's intimacy and allover apprehension of nature.

In this context of reassessment, the idea of an exhibition under the rubric 'Early and Late' is a challenging one. 'Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late', organised by Elizabeth Hutton Turner at the Phillips, where this reviewer saw the exhibition, and travelling to the Denver Art Museum, explored two periods of the artist's career, the Nabi period before 1900 and the so-called 'late years' (1920-47), as well as the links between them in the imprecisely defined 'middle years'. Comprising some one hundred and thirty paintings, sculptures, drawings, lithographs, illustrated books, and photographs, the show included not only many of the Phillips's own holdings but an excellent array of loans, from Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Bonnard's achievement was to distill reality into a colourful mirror of life's cyclic course and nature's regenerative force. The private size and given sequence of the rooms at the Phillips, still reflecting the spirit of the founder, might have encouraged a thematic rather than a chronological hanging of the works which would have been beneficial to the exhibition. Under the titles 'Japonisme' and 'Paris Street', 'Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late' juxtaposed early works like Two poodles (1891), The cab horse (c. 1895), and the Phillips's own Narrow street in Paris (c. 1897) (Fig. 1) with a group of mature and late interiors, of outstanding quality, that translate the intimist Nabi style into a more stagelike appearance, among them The table (1925) and The breakfast room (1930-31). The 'Light' section in particular presented the artist at his best, its focus on his complex mode of perception after 1900 manifesting in strong moments of aesthetic and formal dialogue between interiors and landscapes--on the one hand The dressing table (1908) and The bath (1925), on the other hand Early spring and the famous 'conceptual' pencil sketches that he drew in his diary during his daily strolls at his house in Le Cannet in the south of France in the 1930s as aide-memoires for his paintings. Orchestrating confrontations between psychologically charged interiors and carefully structured landscapes, and showcasing Bonnard's complex way of analysing his surroundings, this section was perhaps the most inspiring and vibrant part of the show; it showed Bonnard as an innovator of genius and a forerunner of postwar art, translating diverse shapes and colours into daring compositions drenched in the spectrum of the rainbow and floating between figuration and abstraction.

The 'Landscape' and 'Shimmering Colour' sections further investigated correspondences among different genres. In 'Landscape', Studio with mimosas (1939-46) evoked Bonnard's mood of reclusive isolation in Le Cannet during the difficult war years. The section further opposed Earthly Paradise (1916-20) to the Phillips's two masterpieces, The terrace (1918) and The open window (1921), both painted in Vernonnet, to the north-west of Paris (and the site of another of Bonnard's homes), demonstrating the artist's ability simultaneously to dialogue with current artistic trends and to bypass and challenge them.