Longing & loss: Pierre Bonnard at MOMA

Commonweal, Sept 25, 1998 by Leo J. O'Donovan

But there were critics as well. Soon after Bonnard's death, Christian Zervos, writing for Cahiers d'Art, echoed Picasso's hostile views in an article titled "Is Pierre Bonnard a Great Painter?" (Matisse angrily wrote over his own copy, "Yes. I certify that Pierre Bonnard is a great painter.") Even more important, the artist's precise intentions and range of achievement remained puzzling to critics and public alike.

Now a dazzling show at MOMA, first presented in a somewhat larger and different format at the Tate Gallery in London, sets out to set the record straight. Curated by Sarah Whitfield at the Tate and by John Elderfield at MOMA, this is not the "modern master" retrospective accorded to Picasso or Matisse, Mondrian or Miro. But it will surely go far toward establishing that Bonnard is indeed a great painter, if a highly unusual and particular one. As a visual experience, it is simply unforgettable. ("Bonnard" will remain at MOMA through October 13. Its catalogue [Bonnard, Abrams, $60, 270 pp.], with lavish reproductions of the eighty works shown in New York as well as others from London, is edited by Whitfield and contains essays by her and Elderfield.)

Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1867, Bonnard attended school there, spending holidays with his family at his paternal grandfather's house in the village of Le Grand-Lemps. He enrolled in both the Faculty of Law and the Academie Julian in Paris, where he met a group of young painters who came under the influence of Paul Gauguin. Giving themselves the name Nabis (Hebrew for prophet), they espoused a purely pictorial, decorative style. Bonnard's Intimacy (1891) is a perfect small example of the flat, all-over, coloristically adventurous approach he took as a young artist; he depicted his sister and brother-in-law smoking together in a highly compressed space, out of which the artist's own clay pipe and hand only gradually emerge for the viewer's eye. The Croquet Game, a year later, is a larger and still more impressive example. It presents the reverie of a family afternoon in which greens, browns, and gold suffuse a lawn where pattern has become more important than perspective. The intimisme of the 1890s eventually included over fifty pictures of the artist's family: "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world, the picture," Bonnard said late in his life. "One may imagine such an artist spending a great deal of time doing nothing but looking around himself and inside himself."

It was during the 1890s that the pivotal event of Bonnard's personal life occurred, his meeting Maria Boursin on a Paris street in 1893. They eventually married in 1925, after almost thirty years together. "Marthe" gradually appears in more and more paintings, such as the apparently erotic nudes Indolence (1898) and Siesta (1900), and eventually figures in over 380 of Bonnard's works.

When one comes upon Man and Woman (1900), the plot thickens. Here a man (the artist) and a woman (Marthe) are presented on either side of the vertical canvas, shortly after intercourse. He stands naked and seems to be reaching for something like a bathrobe. Likewise naked, she sits on the bed, fondling one of two kittens. Between them, and running almost the entire height of the picture, is a screen which represents a seemingly insuperable barrier - or, perhaps, as one critic has observed, the tree in the garden under which Adam and Eve sinned. This puzzling, imperfect, poignant work is an interpretive key for all that follows: The supposed hedonist who painted the savor of sensuous intimacy was in fact always somehow estranged from the object of desire.

Curiously, for a colorist of his caliber, it was only after the turn of the century that Bonnard rediscovered Impressionism. With others of his generation, he valued the movement's freshness, informality, and realism. But he wanted to surpass it as regards composition and, still more, the play of color. Two beautifully paired paintings from 1908 present Bonnard at his shimmering best. The Bathroom Mirror, all cool blue and gray, shows a washstand with a mirror above it that reflects a small child at a table holding a teacup and the torso of a lush nude drying herself after the bath. Just slightly larger, The Bathroom moves the viewer back from the same washstand to reveal half of the bedroom in which a tawny nude stands after her bath, beside a dazzling pink bed and before a lace-covered window of golden light. The mirror now reflects a frontal view of the woman. The treatment of space makes no effort at rigorous perspective - and yet yields it. The range of color is astonishing, the play of light even more so. Each painting, and especially the two together, perfectly represent what Bonnard meant when he said that he wished "to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden," and that the work of art is "a stopping of time." Not a moment in time, as in classical Impressionism. Rather, a stopping of time.

But time can be held still only in memory. Shortly before World War I, Bonnard took painful stock of his previous work and began to move in another direction. Now his decentered, multifocused vision, as Pierre Schneider has described it, becomes more pronounced, as does the play and counterplay of center and periphery in his canvases.