Paintings
1908
Oil on canvas. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
In this well
known painting, the woman poses in a room almost seething with decoration: in the
lace curtains, the wallpaper, sofa and carpet. Even the blues and green-blues of the
washstand and bath in the left side of painting have the shimmer of water. We feel
distinctly uneasy in the setting — the more so because the sofa seems not securely
fastened to the floor, and the perspective of the bath suggests we are more suspended
over it than standing back to view the young woman as presented.
That nude study
has splendid vitality, but some odd features when we look closely. Her left thigh
has a thickening or bulge, and both feet disappear into a haze of light and rather
muddy colours. Her right elbow glows and both legs are striated with lighter and warmer
colours than the light source makes possible. Indeed, apart from the oddities, it's
also a rather academic study and not in keeping with the cheerfully naif painting
of the rest of the work.
Does it all work? Just about, if we make virtues of
what before modernism were seen as shortcomings. Bonnard has established his direct
way of painting and will not shift from it to plan in the way taught in academies.
Each painting is an adventure, an attempt to make a pleasing result as the paint is
applied and the scene takes shape. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't,
but the failures can be corrected in another painting. A usual colour scheme here
would be split analogous, yellow against red-pinkish to green-blue but Bonnard has
fresh greens in the far wall and carpet, and clearly feels they are necessary, although
he may have reduced them a little in the wallpaper. And he's right. The aim was not
a harmonious composition but one in which the woman's strong figure brings calm and
solidity to the shifting surroundings. Later, in his 'woman in a bath' series, the
figure too will dissolve into a fuzz of pointillist-like colours, but here she stands
Janus like between the new and the old conceptions of painting.
Nude in Yellow
Nude
in Yellow. Oil on canvas. Private collection
In this imposing work the Mediterranean
light has filled the room with a bright happiness, and the colour expresses that mood.
Even the woman's body, sensitively modeled about the back, buttocks and thighs, seems
incendiary with the light, and the sun-filled draperies are left as coloured doodlings
on white. The shapes create interesting patterns but depths are ambivalent: it is
the clothes on the chair that give these scenery flats their position in the third
dimension. The colour scheme is split analogous, yellow against pink-purple-blue.
The textures tie the shapes together.
Again, this is a celebrated piece, but
not without its problems. Form has largely dissolved into patterns: the washstand,
clothes on the chair, and the lace drapes on the window. Only the unclothed woman
has some substance, though the flesh texture and colour are similar to the walls and
floor. To prevent the figure being lost into the wall, Bonnard has had to add a rather
arbitrary outline, blue or white on the body and red about the hair. The drawing is
weak. The feet don't rest securely in the shoes and the woman's left shoulder and
arm dwindle away into some curious proboscis or muscular tube. The model is generally
taken to be Bonnard's mistress, the youthful features being explained by Bonnard painting
from memory, notes and photographs, but there is something disturbing in a work that
doesn't bother to get basic features right of a woman lived with for forty years.
Bonnard was a not a revolutionary artist but a Nabi painter of quiet domestic
scenes. He painted longer in the style than almost anyone else, and his best works
express a warm contentment in the life around. Here, however, that love of surface
dazzle and texture has become an end in itself, art no longer being a celebration
of the visual world, but an exercise in painterly concerns. Washstand, clothes and
windows are very different things, in colour, texture, density, material, significance,
etc., but have here been flattened into diaphanous, insubstantial matters.
No
one could dislike Bonnard. His pieces are warm, intimate and colourful, if sometimes
a little droll or inconsequential wth their interiors, dogs and domestic tranquility.
But the work could have been much better, and in general artists of the last century
and a half have not been well served by the art establishment, which first ignored
their work and then lavished unqualified praise on things that were only good in part.
Modern painting has become collectable, and no doubt investments would be at risk
if dealers, galleries, museums and critics did not continually talk up the stock,
hanging contemporary pieces of modest achievement beside the great masterpieces of
the past and explaining any perceived faults or shortcomings by appeal to esoteric
theory. But painting is a dialogue between artist and public, and is probably better
conducted in ways that painters understand: i.e. in seeing what they try to do, how,
and to what extent their attempts are successful.
Pierre
Bonnard, the great colourist among modern French artists, was born in a small town
southwest of Paris in 1867, studied law at the Sorbonne from 1885 to 1888, but then
turned to painting, attending the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. With
Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard formed the Nabis (Hebrew
for prophets), drawing on the work of Paul Gauguin and then Japanese woodcuts. 
