 FURTHER AFIELD
Further Afield: Bonnard at the Met
Double Takes
By Judy Pomeranz
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) has long been known as a painter of pleasing, sometimes decorative and even pretty works. Not particularly daring in either his subject matter or style and not consumed with such radical new trends as cubism or abstraction which consumed many of his contemporaries, Bonnard was considered a fine colorist who painted landscapes, interiors and other quotidian scenes that were punchy, technically competent, easy on the eye and just edgy enough in their respect for post-impressionist compositional conceits to earn him a reputation as a serious artist.
Bonnard was born near Paris in Fontenay-aux-Roses and studied law before going on to study art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Julian. Early in his artistic career, he discovered the work of Paul Gauguin, whom he greatly admired and in many respects emulated. Like Gauguin, Bonnard worked in a brilliant, highly subjective palette and tended to flatten his compositions as if out of respect for the two-dimensionality of the canvas. He also eliminated unnecessary detail and simplified the world into broad, flat spaces, é la Gauguin, though his canvases were generally less reductive and more crowded and active than Gauguin’s and his paint application often more interesting.
But during the last decades of his long career, years that he spent primarily in the hill town of Le Cannet in the south of France, Bonnard began to explore color, form, light and space in fascinating new and idiosyncratic ways and to produce a body of work that art historians now recognize set him apart as a superbly inventive modernist in his own right. Eighty of the interior and still life works he created during these years, from 1923 to 1947, are now on display in an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 This was high praise indeed from a man who was born in Bologna and rarely ever left his hometown. But despite Morandi’s sheltered, rather ascetic lifestyle and reluctance to travel far from home, and despite the inherent quietude of his subject matter, Morandi was discovered and embraced by an international group of fans and patrons who lent him enormous credibility and helped him achieve a degree of fame that persists, in some circles, to this day. The Met obviously intends that this first American retrospective survey of Morandi’s work will broaden that circle considerably.
And they certainly succeed in demonstrating Bonnard’s unique and ultimately compelling vision of the world. Characterized by rich, saturated colors woven together in brushstrokes that are visually separable but inextricably intertwined and by compositions that employ odd perspectives, play with geometric forms and merge background into foreground and negative into positive space, these works have both a beauty and an aesthetic gravitas that belie their pedestrian subject matter.
I’m trying to do what I have never done, give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and nothing at the same time, Bonnard said, and he manages to achieve that ironic balance in many of these paintings. An initial look at one of his late paintings will often reveal the vague but pleasant essence of a place or group of things, but a much longer and more concentrated look is generally required to see the details and to parse the imagery or to realize that you can’t quite fully do either one.
For example, in Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room), one immediately takes in a pleasing scene with a table in the foreground covered with a blue-and-white striped cloth upon which sit a variety of objects. One sees a window in the background beyond which lies a mostly green landscape. If the viewer is particularly perceptive, he might also take in the extravagantly patterned wall covering on that first glance. But only a concentrated gaze will reveal the existence of a shadowy, dark figure off to the left of the window and what may be a dog beside her. A careful and deliberate reading of the canvas will also raise but not answer questions about the bulky shape on the right-hand side, the oddly concrete nature of the shadows and the tabletop which seems to tilt precariously forward.
In painting after painting, we see the same thing happening. We see people or things that surprise us by emerging from the shadows or from the background or from a morass of brushwork; we see shifting perspectives, often many in a single canvas; we see solid objects dissolving into something ephemeral and intangibles becoming concrete. Nothing in these canvases is fully discrete or separate, everything is woven into a fabric of colorful brushwork in which hierarchies are nonexistent, air and space are as important as people and things and background and foreground merge and meld, no one part of the composition demanding greater attention than any other.
For all their focus on the visual world, Bonnard’s paintings are definitively subjective. Their subjects appear not as they would to the naked eye but instead as filtered through the artist’s distinctive perception, which was highly studied. Bonnard worked in a deliberate manner, making numerous pencil sketches in tiny diaries and quick watercolor studies from nature, all of which formed the basis for his finished works, paintings he created not onsite but in his studio and which he worked over obsessively, often spending long periods of time on a single canvas. The exhibition nicely reveals these working methods through numerous examples of his preparatory works, some of which relate directly to paintings in the show.
Even if you are well familiar with Bonnard’s work, this show provides a focused and concentrated look at the latest period of his productive life and will likely offer revelations that will encourage you to rethink his place in the 20th-century canon.
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through April 19. For further information, phone 212-535-7710 or visit
www.metmuseum.org.
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