Art: Fuzzy Triumph

Fifty-nine years ago, a Paris art student wrote excitedly to his parents: “I’m earning my own living!” He had just sold a poster for a champagne ad. Since then critics have called Pierre Bonnard everything from “insistently disagreeable” to “the greatest living painter.” Last week in Paris Pierre Bonnard was having his greatest triumph.

A retrospective show of Bonnard’s 35 color symphonies was the talk of the town. Cagey Paris art dealers valued them at 500,000 francs apiece ($4,200), three times their prewar price. Critics and gallery goers wondered whether it meant that postwar Frenchmen wanted a rest from the chaotic world, and from the chaotic painting which had mirrored it for three decades.

Pierre Bonnard’s latter-day success is galling to some Parisian moderns, who think he is an old fogy. He has never followed the fads of Parisian painting, never gone surrealist or cubist, never painted a face with one eye or three. Many of Bonnard’s pictures fall into a kind of sentimental fuzziness that reminds people of Renoir.

For four decades Pierre Bonnard has changed neither his style nor his subjects. His lushly colored, impressionist scenes of French life delight the eye, make no demands on the mind. Having neither the audacity of Matisse nor the intellectuality of Picasso, he turns constantly to the commonplace: simple cottage interiors, village streets, somnolent nudes, bowls of fruit or fish, all as familiar and soothing to his fellow Frenchmen as old bed slippers and good wine.

Nobody Home. When the Germans arrived, Bonnard left Paris to live in a mountainside villa near Cannes. Vichy officials made the two-mile climb to his place, asked the old man to paint the portrait of another oldster—Marshal Petain. Said Bonnard: “If Marshal Petain is a good model, I’ll paint him. But, remember, if I don’t like my work I reserve the right to destroy it.” The Vichyites dropped the whole idea.

Bonnard continues to live in his villa, visits Paris infrequently. He is up each day at 5, walks, putters about in his garden, does all his painting after lunch. When unwanted visitors interrupt his work he emerges blandly from his house, announces that “M. Bonnard is out,” and shuts the gate.

Using neither palette nor easel, Bonnard mixes his paints on a dinner plate, tacks his canvas on a wall. When a painting is finished, he trims away the extra canvas. Dealers have learned that a Bonnard picture never fits into a ready-made frame.

His powerful, peasant hands work slowly and uncertainly. Says he: “Matisse knows where he’s going, but I never know where I’ll land.” Completely unpretentious, he admits to being influenced by other artists: “But that’s very good! You can’t possibly invent painting all by yourself.” Paintings that fail to pan out never discourage Pierre Bonnard. “I always work on paintings that miscarry,” he says, “They pose exciting problems. It’s good to fail.”