Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Bonnard Late Interiors

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors, Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 27 - April 19, 2009

Had he lived in other circumstances, Bonnard, who at one point had been declared le Nabis trés japonard by the Nabis clubhouse, could have declared confidently like Sengai that he had no method. But he was a 20th Century Frenchman, and obliged by war and natural inclination to live in doubt. Picasso famously criticized him for it:

That's not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn't know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it's a little pink too, so there's no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind what color the sky really ought to be. Painting can't be done that way.

You can't paint a Picasso that way, to be sure, but in Bonnard's case, that potpourri turns into a nicely fragrant melange. Still, Bonnard knew what he was up against.

I tried to paint [a bouquet of roses] directly, scrupulously, I was absorbed by the details. Then I realized I was floundering. I wasn't getting anywhere. I had lost my original thought and couldn't get it back again; I couldn't find what it was that had captivated me, my starting point. … For some painters—Titian, for instance— that captivation is so powerful that they never lose it, even if they remain in direct contact with their subject for a very long time. I, however, am very weak. I find it difficult to control myself when my subject is right in front of me.

This and other telling quotes, such as this one…

To tell the truth I have trouble with painting. … I work so slowly that I must use paints that can be revised or added to continually. … It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose.

…adorned the walls of Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors at the Metropolitan Museum. In the end, Bonnard committed to as many decisions as any other painter; he is only unusual in his tendency to regard them as provisional as long as he could. This turned out to be a boon in his hands. Contrary to nearly everything that has ever been said about them, Bonnard's paintings possess a particular, personal, and formidable surety, built from the lively application of doubt to every square inch of the canvas.

Perhaps his detractors look at the photos of the bundled ectomorph noodling away on his unstretched canvases and ascribe the lack of a bold plan to milquetoast hesitancy. It's important to appreciate that during Bonnard's last two decades of life, figurative painting had become a maddeningly complicated affair, and Bonnard did more than any contemporary to activate all of the possibilities simultaneously. One can find in Bonnard the vigorous, arbitrary coloration of Fauvism, the spatial flicker of analytical Cubism, the perspective-crushing planar tilts of synthetic Cubism, and drawing that evokes the interior struggles we would associate in an exaggerated form with mid-century expressionism. Meanwhile, the short, unblended strokes of Impressionism were still informing his work, as well as tendencies that originated in Japanese printmaking but by then had been so thoroughly distilled as to exist only as essence, an evocative restraint upon color, space, and emotion.

The exhibition made an intelligent choice to include still lifes, watercolors, and datebooks filled with dense drawings and forego the large, familiar canvases of the perpetually bathing Marthe. One might get the impression from his larger works that Bonnard was engaged in a prolonged act of improvisation, worked out entirely on canvas. This is not the whole story. He drew prolifically if informally—a lined, dated appointment book served as well as anything for sketches—and referred to watercolors executed from the subject. I have come to disdain the Lehman Wing, but its ancillary room served these drawings and sketches admirably and offered a glimpse into Bonnard's supposed non-method. As for the venue, it was fine for Fra Angelico back in 2005, because his little panels, exquisitely detailed, invited close inspection and glowed in the church-level lighting. The Morandi show from late last year needed a touch more room to breathe and at least a few more photons on the work. The Bonnards were all but elbowing each other in the halflight. Although this brought out a certain urban quality in paintings whose dominant vector is the light of Provence, it was a frustrating presentation.

At any rate, the still lifes evince a bit less unbridled invention, and in context it's easy to see why—he was depending on them to inform his larger works, and consequently they feature more data and less interpretation. He made exceptions, though, notably in the case of an arrangement of mimosas that looks curiously figurative; the clusters of blooms echo Marthe's head and its stylish short haircut. The watercolors are played fairly straight, and the pencil sketches (well represented in the show's excellent catalogue) are developed with a thick net of marks in a manner that recalls Giacometti.

The aggregate effect of the exhibition is to present Bonnard's as one of the supremely self-examined private lives of the century. It was a life given over to domesticity, introspection, and simple pleasures, and yet it didn't shrink from the hardest problems that art had to offer at the time. On the contrary, he cut through those challenges the way water cuts through stone, by peaceful, lively, persistent effort. The results are marked with a solidity all out of proportion to the light, unassuming technique that brought them into being. This, too, was part of Bonnard's plan, such as he had one. In 1946, a year before he died, he wrote in his daybook:

I hope that my painting will endure without craquelure. I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.

How wonderful to have so utterly succeeded.