News Intelligence Analysis
January 30, 2009
Art Review | 'Pierre Bonnard:
The Late Interiors' Bonnard Late in Life, Searching for the Light
By Roberta Smith
Click on the painting to see
the New
York Times' slide show
By the last quarter-century of his long, productive career, Pierre
Bonnard (1867-1947) was deep into what might be called his Red-Yellow-Orange
Period. These colors dominate “Pierre Bonnard: the Late
Interiors,” a sumptuous exhibition that lends some unseasonable
warmth to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically to the
tepid lower level of its Robert Lehman Collection.
The fiery hues may be offset with touches of green, blue and darker tones; they may be intermittently superseded by expanses of pulsing white — a snowy door or mantelpiece or, most often, a blazing tablecloth. But generally they reign supreme among the show’s 80 or so paintings, drawings and watercolors. All are interiors or still lifes or, best, a hybrid; all were made from 1923, when Bonnard was 56, to the end of 1946, a month or so before his death.
Dita Amory, the show’s organizer and acting associate curator in charge of the Lehman Collection, is happy to do without the grander, cooler, lavender-silver paintings of his enigmatic, ageless wife, Marthe, in her bath that are usually celebrated as Bonnard’s greatest works, most recently during the Museum of Modern Art’s 1998 Bonnard retrospective. Ms. Amory’s theory here is that those masterpieces have overshadowed all else. While the Met show is a bit too uneven to make the case, it contains plenty of wonderful paintings that reveal the artist meditating on the nature of time, perception, memory and the ways and means of painting, while reviewing the glories of early modernism and tying up some of its loose ends. In addition, he brought back to Western painting a radiance of color little seen since the Sienese.
As an artist Bonnard was, like Philip Guston, both precocious and late blooming. He started fast. By 1888 he was in the thick of the Parisian vanguard, part of a group of young painters, with his lifelong friend Edouard Vuillard, who called themselves the Nabi (the prophets) and emulated Gauguin. Bonnard was a sought-after designer of posters and illustrator of books and an innovative printmaker; he made puppets and designed theater sets. And he finished magnificently, roaming restlessly throughout France from Deauville in the north to Vernon near Monet’s Giverny, finally setting in Le Cannet, a little town above Cannes that he first visited in 1923.
Bonnard wrote, “There is always color, it has yet to become light.” This transformation was the project of his final decades. By then he had narrowed his subjects down to his immediate, most intimate surroundings. Over and over Bonnard painted the rooms he inhabited and their garden views; Marthe, whether bathing, bent over her morning cup of coffee or laying the table for lunch, often shadowed by a household pet. He painted the dining room table arrayed with vases of flowers, bowls and dishes of food or baskets of the fruits and vegetables that went into making their meals.
Working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases tacked directly to the wall, he painted largely from memory with the help of quick sketches and watercolors, burnishing his motifs until they approached incandescence. He said that painting from reality distracted him from the task of making the painting a freestanding entity. (A painting “is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order” was how Bonnard’s fellow Nabi Maurice Denis put it.)
In his best works, seeing and feeling merged in forms that glowed from within; decorative and subjective became one. It’s not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard; there’s also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures.
One of the most interesting things about Bonnard’s paintings is the time warp created by their folding together of form, color and feeling. Everything contributes to a kind of slowness that relates to both art and life. We experience his surfaces as diaries of their own making, accruing with pauses and second thoughts in gentle or erratic brushstrokes, layers of color within color and tracts of contrasting textures. We sense both the time and emotion invested in them.
The same retinue of baskets, compotes, teapots, tablecloths and platters cycles through the images. As we move from canvas to canvas we feel the days pass and time stand still. Everything moves around, but nothing changes.
The time in the paintings is also deepened by furtive movements and rustlings, mostly thanks to Bonnard’s figures. They often seem to shift about, partly because we can look right at them for a while before we actually see them. Our shock that they have been there all along, or have just arrived, somehow prolongs the painting into an event.
Some of these figures are distracted dreamers tucked in a corner or behind furniture, otherwise engaged. In “The White Interior” of 1932 a woman (presumably Marthe) all but ducks beneath the table to stroke a nearly invisible cat. In another white wonder, “The Table” (1925), she appears at the top of this immense raftlike surface. Even after we realize that she is not the uppermost of several plates of victuals climbing up its jutting surface, it is hard to see that she is mixing food for an almost-phantom dachshund.
In several other works, like the Modern’s “Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room),” the figures suddenly appear, like mute sentinels, from the wings. In “The Breakfast Table” the woman holding a cup to her mouth is one of several golden blurs, an Oscar statuette grabbing a snack before the awards ceremonies.
Some of the smaller still lifes are wonderful in their simple refusal of comfortable representational convention, for example the steep reds and yellows (and heavy yellow dashes) of “The Dessert,” which border on abstraction. Others contain seemingly forthright homages to other artists, like the background (wallpaper?), so redolent of Monet’s water lilies, in “The Cherries.” Even more startling is the greyhound in “Still Life With Greyhound,” which looks almost as if Cezanne took the brush and painted it.
But the large paintings are strongest. Accommodating the greatest formal and psychological complexity, they are marvelously constructed all-in-one summations of the French tradition. They depict rooms where the everyday objects accumulate into accidental still lifes and where landscapes seen through windows introduce nature but also function as paintings within paintings. Often these windows are seen straight on, as in “Table in Front of the Window” and its better-known cousins from the Modern and the Guggenheim.
This is also the case in “The French Window (Morning at Le Cannet),” in which the vivid landscape framed in a darkly shadowed door contrasts with the relatively pale hues of the interior and the relatively clear-cut figure of Marthe, toying with something at the table while Bonnard, reflected in a mirror, sketches her.
Marthe, who had poor health, mostly physical but sometimes mental, died in 1942. She had been Bonnard’s muse since 1893, and toward the end of their life together she was sometimes characterized as his jailer. But for her, Bonnard would have gotten out more and stayed in Paris longer. Still, he might not have painted as much, and he was bereft without her.
One of the strangest paintings in this exhibition is “Interior: Dining Room,” which is dated 1942-46, Bonnard’s years without Marthe. It shows the plunging table dotted with loaded plates, first on a white tablecloth, then on a red one. After that comes a window whose panes are black as night, set in a wall whose red-yellow-orange wallpaper is not so much brightly striped as simply going up in flames.
“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org, through April 19.
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Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
Jed Perl
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
There is a tropical heat in Pierre
Bonnard's late
paintings. This subtle hedonist, a contemplative
spirit with king-sized obsessions, regards the colors
on his palette as objects of delectation. Each stroke
of alizarin or orange or green paint that he works into
the canvas has a life-giving
power.
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