Longing & loss: Pierre Bonnard at MOMA

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

In Bonnard's still lifes from the 1920s onward, the opulent treatment of ordinary subjects can be savored only through the multiple perspectives of a viewer's actively searching gaze. The famous Provencal Jug (1930), for all its rich color and dancing light, reveals its full mystery only as one's eye gradually moves to inspect the arm at the right edge of the canvas - and is amazed to find that now the jug with its bouquet, in peripheral vision, has taken on three-dimensional volume. Still more dazzling is Basket of Fruit on a Table in the Garden at Le Cannet (ca. 1944), with its golden grapes and red cherries in an earthenware jug on a tabletop that might have been painted by Monet in Giverny. Here the sheer lushness of the work's color makes its sketchily represented three-dimensionality tilt directly forward into the viewer's space - just as Matisse was discovering new ways to let color bring a picture frontally toward the viewer at the same time.

In 1926, Bonnard bought a hillside villa at Le Cannet, a small town above Cannes. He called it Le Bosquet. There he painted panoramic views of the town, the verdant hills, and lush scenes from his garden. He reveled in the natural disorder of nature, using an almost unlimited range of markings to evoke it, much as did van Gogh. One wall in the gallery devoted to landscapes is particularly mesmerizing. In Almond Tree in Blossom (1946-7), the tree seems to be blooming before our eyes. Landscape with Red Roofs (1945-6) presents an almost paradisiacal vision as seen from the bathroom window at Le Bosquet.

There is a similar interplay of warm domestic shelter opening out into a visionary, almost primeval nature in Bonnard's interiors - for some the height of his achievement. If any part of the MOMA exhibition could have been expanded to its profit (apart from including the artist's drawings), more interiors would have been my choice. Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-5) is here, as is Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room) of 1930-1. What seems at first a straightforward scene of a bountifully laden breakfast table before a window which opens onto a garden and finally to a public square, reveals itself as somehow blocked, unattainable: imagined more than inhabited. Here the distant garden carries forward the reversal of emotional expectation that first saw Man and Woman as erotic and the later The Earthly Paradise (1916-20) as Edenic, when each in fact equally represents threat and estrangement.

The climax of the exhibition is the large gallery of bathing nudes (Marthe) followed by a smaller gallery of the remarkable late paintings of her lying immersed in her bath. These depictions show the early influence of Degas, though without his often strained poses, and the nudes are generally shown in relaxed, easy poses in increasingly complex interiors. The Bathroom (1932) was painted at Le Bosquet. The room was walled in white ceramic tiles and had a linoleum floor-covering with blue and white lozenge pattern. But the 5 o'clock afternoon light (as we verify from a clock on the washstand) brings the gleaming white bathtub on the left side of the painting into harmony with white tiles there, while a rosy rectangular form on the right (perhaps a small cot) is paired with tiles that now turn blue and violet. A rainbow curtain hangs behind the iridescent body of Marthe, whose right breast reflects the white light from the bathtub. The color of this painting delights every eye that looks on it, but only gradually does one realize how complex the interplay of color and light is, how it seduces our vision continuously back and forth throughout the painting. Here is a canvas worthy of comparison with any other in the century, and indeed with any of the great nudes or bathers in the history of art.