Bonnard

by Sarah Whitfield

It seems somehow revolutionary that a turquoise-blue painting graces the cover of Bonnard, the catalog accompanying a 1998 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The color of the endpapers--deep yellow--tells readers that even the book designers know with which end of the color spectrum most viewers associate this sensuous painter. The translucent-looking, sun-struck, golden woman in the bathtub--the artist's wife and favorite model--is so emblazoned on our memories that it takes an exhibition like the one documented in this book to remind viewers of Bonnard's extraordinary range as a colorist.

The early, intimate, Nabi paintings are often dark, with figures that stand out like candle flames in shadowy interiors. But Bonnard's use of umber, sienna, and various blacks--occasionally in the shape of a dachshund--is forever part of what makes those brilliant reds and oranges sing. Even 60 years into his career, the painter gave full range to his palette, balancing the most highly colored canvasses with others of pale, soft grays. Those readers who have been succored on the 1984 Phillips Collection catalogue will find MoMA's new one every bit as nourishing.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

269 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1998

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a bit obsessed with Bonnard. The two introductory essays of this art catalogue are excellent, and the reprints of his paintings are helpfully positioned alongside any preliminary sketches that might’ve preceded them. The first essay by Whitfield focuses on Bonnard’s connections to the French symbolist movement; she shows how his work compares to his contemporaries who were also coming out from the same movement. The second essay by Elderfield seems to assume a certain theory of how our perceptual apparatuses interact with visual art, and he seems to use Bonnard’s work to illustrate the truths of this theory. This essay was at first unpleasant, in this way of using an artist as a place to exercise some aesthetic theory, but then Elderfield also sprinkles in some surprising descriptions of how the work personally-psychologically impacts him, which was meaningful. Elderfield goes into how Bonnard both paints from memory and thematizes that in his art, but it’s not merely nostalgic or a matter of prolonging pleasure; he paints in such a way as to show how the beauty and pleasure of the moment is fleeting, and there’s something haunting there.

I personally don’t see this haunting quality in most of Bonnard’s work. But I’d like to riff a bit on how I’m relating to his bath paintings, in particular, at the moment. Elderfield describes Bonnard’s paintings of Marthe, his wife, in bathtubs as a sort of entombment. She had various nervous or neurotic disorders, would compulsively wash, and was said by doctors to not have much longer to live. One could view her lost and suspended from the mundane, temporal world, while soaking in the bath, as analogous to how souls, in death, are lost and suspended from this world, as well. I see it in a slightly different way. I think there’s a living reverie and repose here, and Bonnard’s own living out and prolonging the beauty of those moments through his memory and painting mirrors Marthe’s being in reverie. This need not be seen as akin to death or any escape from life, but a place within life which can be a source of ever more serenity—memory of good things will always be there with us, and we can always return to places or activities of life which provide such repose, whether it’s a bath, an embrace, a poem, a painting, etc. I see a lot of Bonnard’s work like this, a matter of extending and reveling in moments like these. It is a visual manifestation of how beautiful the mental act of remembering can be.

It’s a common description of Bonnard that he achieved expressing a certain intimacy which was absent of the impressionists who preceded him. I also don’t quite feel that his paintings are intimate in a straightforward sense of that term. I guess it depends on the painting. Some of them are obviously interpersonal, where the subject (often woman) depicted it being seen by a spectator. But others are not like this at all; in his women-in-bath paintings, as well as certain others like nudes in front of mirrors, it feels like we’re caught up in the dream of the subject. There is no spectator, no possibility of an interpersonal intimacy. But I guess in a sense this is ever more intimate: the spectator has devoted himself so fully to the subject in her moment that it seems as if he has vanished. Of course, it still must be from a spectator’s perspective, or what I suppose Bonnard imagines Marthe to be undergoing as she lays in her bath, but when he is caught up in memory, and when she was factually caught up in reverie, his imagination of her and her reality can’t be all that distinct in a sense.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small book I think. Bonnard... great color but maybe too busy sometimes.