Painting: The Distant Witness

Pierre Bonnard called himself “the last impressionist,” but in the throes of creation he was more like the first action painter. He would tack a huge canvas on a wall and, striding back and forth, begin jabbing spots of paint in a dozen places. After days of vigorous work, a nude emerged here, a still life there. Then he cut the paintings apart, stretched them into tambourines of jin gling color.

Whether or not Bonnard was behind or before his time, his retrospective show at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art,-with 83 oils and 87 other works, establishes him as the distant witness of current art.

French Milquetoast. Bonnard was headed halfheartedly for the law when, in 1890, he made a 100-france sale of a lithograph poster for a champagne merchant. Flat, clearly influenced by the vogue for Japanese prints, it showed a giddy damsel in bubbly billows. Its appearance on the kiosks of Paris caused Toulouse-Lautrec to seek Bonnard out; it was not until a year later that the sawed-off chronicler of Montmartre made his own first poster. The sale also persuaded Bonnard’s father, a war ministry bureaucrat, to let his son pursue art as a career.

A thin slice of French Milquetoast in appearance, Bonnard fell into the celebrated company of Vuillard, Vallotton and Maillol. Gauguin was chief prophet, telling them to express what they saw in colors straight from the tube. If a shadow had a bluish look, said he, the painter should use pure ultramarine. A group called the Nabis, or prophets, gathered and asserted that the imitation of three dimensions was less vital than a blatant arrangement of lines and colors. That was art; the other was slavish copying. Bonnard became “the very Japanese Nabi” for his fascination with oriental asymmetry, ascending perspective and sinuous contours.

Anatomical Outlaw. For a while, Bonnard was a flaneur and sketcher of Paris street life. Lithography, with its kinship to line drawing and its inherent limits of only a few undifferentiated colors, was Bonnard’s proving ground. He embellished sheet music and illustrated the writings of Verlaine, Octave Mirbeau and Andre Gide. The flat stone’s print only confirmed him as an outlaw toward perspective, modeling and rigorous anatomy.

Then a yellow, 10-h.p. Renault opened Bonnard to rural beauty. He would motor through the countryside, stopping frequently to sketch. He fled Paris for Mediterranean country villas.

Yet in the end he found his true subject matter indoors. It was the domestic moment that caught his eye. Lazy, hazy days of summer-when the sun caressed the contours of a kitchen table, or of his basset hounds, or of his wife-provided Bonnard’s book of hours. Critics called his work intimist. Unlike any artist since the 18th century’s Chardin, he made home life into a universe.

Model Wife. Bonnard’s indoor art thrived on women. He loved them in awkward, innocent postures, when they let down their shields of glamor. Women for Bonnard were his wife, Marthe de Meligny, a cute midinette he met when he was 28. When they were married 30 years later, he found out that she was not aristocratic, only plain Maria Boursin, but his love never left him.

It was she that he painted oftenest (see following pages). Her presence borrowed color from the walls of her bath. While fauvism, cubism, even dadaism and surrealism bypassed Bonnard, he kept his eye on nature and his wife’s place in it. To many, through the 1930s and 1940s, Bonnard was oldfashioned, a man preoccupied with outer nature rather than inner psychology. His art seemed wishy-washy, facile, banal in its apparent sentimentality.

Spectral Tapestries. But Bonnard was not concerned with psychology. “We can abstract beauty out of everything,” he said. “A painting is a series of spots that are joined together and ultimately form the object over which the eye wanders without obstruction.” Bonnard’s spectral tapestries are a surface abstraction that invite the eye to play tourist. His imagery is so pleasing that few see the tricks of color and form that wrench the paintings away from realism into perceptual dreams.

“God is light,” said Bonnard, and he was an ingenious supplicant. In the checkerboard tiles that pattern his work, the color changes to harmonize with nearby colors. Nude flesh becomes a chameleon mirror for interior hues; a bathtub becomes an irregular cocoon for the human form. Bonnard’s pictures are made of optical bewilderment and caprices of color.

Bonnard’s wife died in 1942; he lived on until 1947, painting in his austere south-of-France villa. When he died at the age of 79, few came to honor the master of color more than nature herself. For his funeral, a rare snowstorm shrouded the spectrum that he had honored so well.

* The show travels to the Art Institute of Chicago for January and February, and to the Los Angeles County Museum for April and May.