Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Pierre Bonnard

An artist’s antipathies can often be as revealing as his enthusiasms. Picasso, for example, loathed Bonnard, describing his painting as a “potpourri of indecision.” Mind you, Picasso also purported to loathe Monet, which is not bad company to keep, I suppose. One can understand why it was necessary for Picasso to react against these painters — their evanescence, their seductive powers, their refulgence represented everything he himself didn’t want to do. Too soft, too representational, too retrospective, too harmonious and finally, for him, too safe. But like many antipathies such hostility often tells us more about the hater than the target. Such a dismissal of an artist of Bonnard’s rank is a brutal and deliberate misunderstanding. Bonnard’s work is far more disciplined and dogged, more modern and integrity-filled than Picasso’s aspersions would imply — indeed, as this superb exhibition at the Tate amply demonstrates — and it is both intriguing and telling to note that Matisse — the other giant of twentieth-century painting — was a lifelong and close friend of Bonnard and, as their wonderful correspondence illustrates, they were almost co-theorists in painterly matters. Matisse’s world could encompass Bonnard’s, but for an artist like Picasso Bonnard had to be removed far beyond the pale.

There is another problem with Bonnard, and not just his refusal to “go modern”: his pictures are simply too beautiful, too sensuous, too flooded with the most delicious light and colour. Any art — however high, however serious — that is hard to resist, that provokes immediate, almost unreflective pleasure, makes people (critics, historians, curators, academics) illogically suspicious. It is this reaction that prompts the classification of Bonnard as a kind of lazy post-post-Impressionist, a hangover from the nineteenth century, still basking in the creative afterglow of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley et al. In fact Bonnard (born in 1867) first made his name at the end of the nineteenth century as an innovative, ultra-modern graphic designer, designing posters and making coloured lithographs. It is worth remembering that underneath the shimmering, feathery brushstrokes and the blurry juxtaposition of pigment there is a tried and robust graphic talent. In 1915 (when Bonnard was forty) he told his nephew that he had resolved a profound artistic crisis in this efficacious and straightfoward manner: “I drew ceaselessly.” And, as the studies for his big landscapes reveal, every painting had its beginnings in a series of highly detailed drawings.

The 1915 crisis had arisen from a fear that colour alone was beginning to rule and overwhelm his art. So Bonnard reapplied himself, quite consciously and with no small pain, relearning the fundamentals behind painting, namely drawing and composition. This was the second crisis of his life that had redirected and corrected his artistic course. The earlier one had occurred in 1905 when he saw the work that Matisse was doing and realized that modernism and everything it implied — all its iconoclasm, its uncompromising decorative side and potential abstraction — was not for him. He voluntarily left that field to others and pursued his own lonely course, a factor that both explains the remarkable homogeneity of Bonnard’s work and also accounts for the marked decline in his reputation between the wars.

Bonnard stayed faithfully with figuration and remained sui generis: his subject matter was classical — the nude, the landscape, the interior, the still life. His development and stylistic divagations were consequently un-dramatic, often marked by nothing more significant than looser brush-stroking, a more severe flattening of the picture plane, a brilliant and daring use of composition, some mannerist distortion and, of course, one of the most rich and beguiling palettes of the twentieth century.

His reputation and his popularity have recovered, unequivocally, from the inter-war slump. Bonnard is now rightly considered one of the great painters of the nude — an equal of Degas and Modigliani. This was an obsession that began early in his life, particularly after his meeting with his muse, a working-class woman called, simply, Marthe, who was his model and companion for most of his life. They met in 1893 and Marthe died in 1942—immortalized in a sequence of paintings covering five decades, ranging from the erotically charged L’Indolente (1898) to the disturbing and celebrated Nu à la Baignoire (1930).

But it is Bonnard’s domestic interiors that remain the quintessential Bonnardian subject, a form of “intimisme,” as the genre is so called, that he made his own. These pictures are in fact highly sophisticated and respond to the most stringent analysis (indeed this is where it can be convincingly established that Bonnard directly inspired Matisse). Yet for all their artistry, their bold coloration, their “flatness,” their use of a form of faux-naïf style, they exert an appeal that extends beyond the painterly. Bonnard’s interiors are pictures that we should and do unashamedly love because — effortlessly, inevitably — they conjure up and provoke memories, experiences and associations of ideas that we can all share and verify. The opening lines of Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Sunday Morning” summon up exactly this ambience and these universal emotions:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo…

Stevens’s poem could be the text behind any number of Bonnard’s magical pictures — and “magic” is the right word, I feel. Trying to analyse one’s response to these luminous, quotidian, yet timeless images is almost redundant, a waste of effort. As Vladimir Nabokov observed: art of this order is experienced in the nape of the neck. They are intimate, they are domestic, there is not much sturm und drang about them, but Bonnard’s paintings — very much like Edward Hopper’s, I would claim — possess an allure that is almost defiantly anti-intellectual — to their eternal and enduring credit. William Blake offered to show us the world in a grain of sand; Bonnard chooses to show us the world in a sunlit breakfast room, with a coffee pot on a gingham tablecloth, and a view through wind-stirred curtains of a green, dew-drenched garden with a distant glimpse of the sea beyond … Who is to say which is the more valid and enticing?

1998