Art: An Eye for Color

Pierre Bonnard’s drawing was fuzzy and weak; the composition of his paintings was haphazard. He borrowed ideas at will from other painters, and frequently flubbed them. When he launched into a picture he just hoped for the best and was never quite sure how it would turn out. (Painting, he suggested, was rather like making hats.) Bonnard had neither Picasso’s drive nor Matisse’s decisiveness; yet his work rivaled theirs.

The last of the French impressionists, Bonnard spent his days putting on canvas the cool and fiery colors that flooded through his eyeglasses. Last year, at 79, he died (TIME, Feb. 3, 1947), leaving in his Riviera villa, and in museums all over the world, the glowing fruits of a lifetime’s happy labor. Last week a huge Bonnard retrospective exhibit at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art was offering conclusive proof of the sunlit warmth and size of his achievement.

Bonnard’s distinctive quality was a clear eye for color. His paintings not only seduce the eye, they also enrich its vision: they give one a fresh look at a nature that swims and sparkles with half-forgotten hues.

Bonnard once pointed out (in a conversation quoted in Verve) that his personal brand of impressionism involved painting first impressions. He described an experiment in painting from nature instead of from memory which had ended in failure. “I tried to paint directly, scrupulously,” he recalled, “and I let myself be absorbed by the details … I realized that I was muddling, that I was getting nowhere. I had lost, I could no longer find my way back to my initial idea, the vision that had charmed me . . . the first seductiveness . . .

“Through seductiveness, or first idea, the painter attains the universal . .. With certain painters—Titian for example—this seductiveness is so powerful that it never abandons them … I myself am very weak, it is difficult for me to remain my own master in front of the subject.”

To maintain the seductiveness of his first impression, Bonnard painted from memory, not from nature. A French critic once provided a vivid picture of Bonnard’s working methods: “With four thumb tacks he had pinned a canvas, lightly tinted with ocher, to the dining-room wall. During the first few days he would glance from time to time, as he painted, at a sketch on a piece of paper twice the size of one’s hand … At first, I could not identify the subject. Did I have before me a landscape or a seascape?

“On the eighth day … I was astonished to be able to recognize a landscape in which a house appeared in the distance and a young woman on a path, with a child and two dogs beside her. From that time on Bonnard no longer referred to his sketch. He would step back to observe the effect of the juxtaposed tones; occasionally he would place a dab of color with his finger, then another next to the first. On about the fifteenth day I asked him how long he thought it would take . . . Bonnard replied: ‘I finished it this morning.’ “