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Pierre Bonnard: Saved from Picasso

First Morandi, now Bonnard: the museum world’s revisitation of marginal modernists has been a welcome byproduct of painting’s return to the contemporary art scene, and the moral is that persistence, talent and a taste for constraint can make a place in history.

Morandi’s monkish life—his tiny studio connected with his sister’s bedroom—came attached to some spectacular small paintings, particularly the late ones, after his retirement from teaching. The colour, tone and structural variation of his tabletop still lifes were a language of infinite modulation. The reflected passing light from an unseen window came to seem a source of visitation for his modest collection of bottles, tins and jars. Depicted space in his paintings was shallow, but it served as a stage for the kind of surprising, unending invention that lies at the heart of painting.

Pierre Bonnard Basket of Fruit: Oranges and Persimmons 1940 © 2008 ARS New York & ADAGP Paris

Dita Amory’s exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s late still life and interiors at the Met brings a similar appreciation to the often-neglected French painter whose work sometimes seems to belong more to the 19th century than the 20th, weighed down by its connection to the fin de siècle Nabis movement. Picasso, famously, hated Bonnard’s work. “That’s not painting,” he said. “Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.” For him, Bonnard was just “a potpourri of indecision” and when you are the leading modern painter of the day, as Picasso was, opinion can harden into dismissive fact at the hands of acolyte critics.

Yve-Alain Bois took aim at Picasso’s dismissal of Bonnard a few years ago on the occasion of another exhibition and tried to solve the issue by mostly hating Picasso back. Amory does a more elegant and secure retrieval of Bonnard’s reputation. She aims at Picasso’s misapprehension of Bonnard: He seldom looked to nature in his painting. He was no scribe of impressionist effects but rather a slow composer who relied on pencil notes and memory to make pictures. His process was slow, additive and expansive. He worked on unstretched canvas pinned to the wall in a small suburban studio. The paintings grew as they needed to grow as he chased the creation of a mental image. It was an art of vignette that only found stable finality at the end.

Like Morandi, Bonnard worked within strict limitations. His subjects were his home, his garden, his wife, his dinner table. He combined the quietude of Chardin and the restlessness of Cézanne in complicated pictures that are surprisingly washy and thin when you see them on the wall rather than in reproduction. Colour accretes as a fretwork of brushstrokes, discovering shapes and shadows and rhythms of light. He goes looking for time in the midst of the everyday, showing us the momentary anchors of consciousness and perception. Picasso must have not read his Proust.

The paintings in Amory’s show were painted when Bonnard was in his 60s and 70s. He and his wife, Marthe, were ensconced in a hillside house outside of Cannes and by all accounts were reclusive. Marthe had been a subject of his paintings for almost 50 years when she died in 1942 (Bonnard survived her by five years) and in the late paintings she is a ghostly figure sunk into her bath or camouflaged by colour on the edge of a room. But there is no Ibsen household drama in the paintings, only a record of what Bonnard called “captivation,” a word that works on a more subtle register to reimagine limits in terms of affection and affirmation. (1000 5 Ave, New York NY)

Pierre Bonnard Table in Front of the Window 1934–5 © 2008 ARS New York & ADAGP Paris

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