Since his death in 1947 at the age of eighty, Pierre Bonnard’s reputation has grown fairly steadily, and in the last five years or so quite dramatically. Some now claim that he is the greatest painter of the century. Twenty years ago he was considered a minor master.
This change in his reputation coincides with a general retreat among certain intellectuals from political realities and confidence. There is very little of the post-1914 world in Bonnard’s work. There is very little to disturb – except perhaps the unnatural peacefulness of it all. His art is intimate, contemplative, privileged, secluded. It is an art about cultivating one’s own garden.
It is necessary to say this so that the more extreme recent claims for Bonnard can be placed in an historical context. Bonnard was essentially a conservative artist – although an original one. The fact that he is praised as ‘a pure painter’ underlines this. The purity consisted in his being able to accept the world as he found it. Was Bonnard a greater artist than Brancusi – not to mention Picasso, or Giacometti? Each period assesses all surviving artists according to its own needs. What is more interesting is why Bonnard will undoubtedly survive. The conventional answer, which begs the question, is that he was a great colourist. What was his colour for?
Bonnard painted landscapes, still lifes, occasional portraits, very occasional mythological pieces, interiors, meals and nudes. The nudes seem to me to be far and away the best pictures.
In all his works after about 1911 Bonnard used colours in a roughly similar way. Before then – with the help of the examples of Renoir, Degas, Gauguin – he was still discovering himself as a colourist; after 1911 he by no means stopped developing, but it was a development along an already established line. The typical mature Bonnard bias of colour – towards marble whites, magenta, pale cadmium yellow, ceramic blues, terracotta reds, silver greys, stained purple, all unified like reflections on the inside of an oyster – this bias tends in the landscapes to make them look mythical, even faery; in the still lifes it tends to give the fruit or the glasses or the napkins a silken glamour, as though they were part of a legendary tapestry woven from threads whose colours are too intense, too glossy; but in the nudes the same bias seems only to add conviction. It is the means of seeing the women through Bonnard’s eyes. The colours confirm the woman.
Then what does it mean to see a woman through Bonnard’s eyes? In a canvas painted in 1899, long before he was painting with typical Bonnard colours, a young woman sprawls across a low bed. One of her legs trails off the bed on to the floor: otherwise, she is lying very flat on her back. It is called ‘L’Indolente: Femme assoupie sur un lit’.
The title, the pose and the art-nouveau shapes of the folds and shadows all suggest a cultivated fin de siècle form of eroticism very different from the frankness of Bonnard’s later works; yet this picture – perhaps just because it doesn’t engage us – offers us a clear clue.
Continue to look at the picture and the woman begins to disappear – or at least her presence becomes ambiguous. The shadow down her near side and flank becomes almost indistinguishable from the cast shadow on the bed. The light falling on her stomach and far leg marries them to the golden-lit bed. The shadows which reveal the form of a calf pressed against a thigh, of her sex as it curves down and round to become the separation between her buttocks, of an arm thrown across her breasts – these eddy and flow in exactly the same rhythm as the folds of the sheet and counterpane.
The picture, remaining a fairly conventional one, does not actually belie its title: the woman continues to exist. But it is easy to see how the painting is pulling towards a very different image: the image of the imprint of a woman on an empty bed. Yeats:
… the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.1
Alternatively one might describe the same state of affairs in terms of the opposite process: the image of a woman losing her physical limits, overflowing, overlapping every surface until she is no less and no more than the genius loci of the whole room.
Before I saw the Bonnard exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1966, I was vaguely aware of this ambiguity in Bonnard’s work between presence and absence, and I explained it to myself in terms of his being a predominantly nostalgic artist: as though the picture was all he could ever save of the subject from the sweep of time passing. Now this seems far too crude an explanation. Nor is there anything nostalgic about ‘Femme assoupie sur un lit’, painted at the age of thirty-two. We must go further.
The risk of loss in Bonnard’s work does not appear to be a factor of distance. The far-away always looks benign. One has only to compare his seascapes with those of Courbet to appreciate the difference. It is proximity which leads to dissolution with Bonnard. Features are lost, not in distance, but, as it were, in the near. Nor is this an optical question of something being too close for the eye to focus. The closeness also has to be measured in emotional terms of tenderness and intimacy. Thus ‘loss’ becomes the wrong word, and nostalgia the wrong category. What happens is that the body which is very near – in every sense of the word – becomes the axis of everything that is seen; everything that is visible relates to it; it acquires a domain to inhabit; but by the same token it has to lose the precision of its own fixed position in time and space.
The process may sound complex, but in fact it is related to the common experience of falling in love. Bonnard’s important nudes are the visual expressions of something very close to Stendhal’s famous definition of the process of ‘crystallization’ in love:
A man takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love he is certain; he recites to himself, with infinite complacency, every item that makes up his happiness. It is like exaggerating the attractions of a superb property that has just fallen into our hands, which is still unknown, but of the possession of which we are assured … In the salt mines of Salzburg they throw into the abandoned depths of a mine a branch of a tree stripped of its leaves by winter; two or three months later they draw it out, covered with sparkling crystallizations: the smallest twigs, those which are no larger than the foot of a titmouse, are covered with an infinity of diamonds, shifting and dazzling; it is impossible any longer to recognize the original branch.2
Many other painters have of course idealized women whom they have painted. But straightforward idealization becomes in effect indistinguishable from flattery or pure fantasy. It in no way does justice to the energy involved in the psychological state of being in love. What makes Bonnard’s contribution unique is the way that he shows in pictorial terms how the image of the beloved emanates outwards from her with such dominance that finally her actual physical presence becomes curiously incidental and in itself indefinable. (If it could be defined, it would become banal.)
Bonnard said something similar himself:
By the seduction of the first idea the painter attains to the universal. It is the seduction which determines the choice of the motif and which corresponds exactly to the painting. If this seduction, if the first idea vanishes all that remains … is the object which invades and dominates the painter.3
Everything about the nudes Bonnard painted between the two world wars confirms this interpretation of their meaning, confirms it visually, not sentimentally. In the bath nudes, in which the woman lying in her bath is seen from above as through a skylight, the surface of the water serves two pictorial functions simultaneously. First it diffuses the image of her whole body, which, whilst remaining recognizable, sexual, female, becomes as varied and changeable and large as a sunset or an aurora borealis; secondly, it seals off the body from us. Only the light from it comes through the water to reflect off the bathroom walls. Thus she is potentially everywhere, except specifically here. She is lost in the near. Meanwhile what structurally pins down these paintings to prevent their presence becoming as ambiguous as hers is the geometric patterning of the surrounding tiles or linoleum or towelling.
In other paintings of standing nudes, the actual surface of the picture serves a similar function to the surface of the water. Now it is as though a large part or almost all of her body had been left unpainted and was simply the brown cardboardy colour of the original canvas. (In fact this is not the case: but it is the deliberate effect achieved by very careful colour and tonal planning.) All the objects around her – curtains, discarded clothes, a basin, a lamp, chairs, her dog – frame her in light and colour as the sea frames an island. In doing so, they break forward towards us, and draw back into depth. But she remains fixed to the surface of the canvas, simultaneously an absence and a presence. Every mark of colour is related to her, and yet she is no more than a shadow against the colours.
In a beautiful painting of 1916–19 she stands upright on tiptoe. It is a very tall painting. A rectangular bar of light falls down the length of her body. Parallel to this bar, just beside it and similar in colour, is a rectangular strip of wallpapered wall. On the wallpaper are pinkish flowers. On the bar of light is her nipple, the shadow of a rib, the slight shade like a petal under her knee. Once again the surface of that bar of light holds her back, makes her less than present; but also once again, she is ubiquitous: the designs on the wallpaper are the flowers of her body.
In the ‘Grand Nu Bleu’ of 1924, she almost fills the canvas as she bends to dry a foot. This time no surface or bar of light imposes on her. But the extremism of the painting of her body itself dissolves her. The painting is, as always, tender: its extremism lies in its rendering of what is near and what is far. The distance between her near raised thigh and the inside of the far thigh of the leg on which she is standing – the distance of the caress of one hand underneath her – is made by the force of colour to be felt as a landscape distance: just as the degree to which the calf of that standing leg swells towards us is made to seem like the emerging of a near white hill from the blue recession of a plain running to the horizon. Her body is her habitation – the whole world in which she and the painter live; and at the same time it is immeasurable.
It would be easy to quote other examples: paintings with mirrors, paintings with landscapes into which her face flows away like a sound, paintings in which her body is seen like a sleeve turned inside out. All of them establish with all of Bonnard’s artfulness and skill as a draughtsman and colourist how her image emanates outwards from her until she is to be found everywhere except within the limits of her physical presence.
And now we come to the harsh paradox which I believe is the pivot of Bonnard’s art. Most of his nudes are directly or indirectly of a girl whom he met when she was sixteen and with whom he spent the rest of his life until she died at the age of sixty-two. The girl became a tragically neurasthenic woman: a frightened recluse, beside herself, and with an obsession about constantly washing and bathing. Bonnard remained loyal to her.
Thus the starting point for these nudes was an unhappy woman, obsessed with her toilet, excessively demanding and half ‘absent’ as a personality. Accepting this as a fact, Bonnard, by the strength of his devotion to her or by his cunning as an artist or perhaps by both, was able to transform the literal into a far deeper and more general truth: the woman who was only half present into the image of the ardently beloved.
It is a classic example of how art is born of conflict. In art, Bonnard said, il faut mentir. The trouble with the landscapes and still lifes and meals – the weakness expressed through their colour – is that in them the surrounding world conflicts are still ignored and the personal tragedy is temporarily put aside. It may sound callous, but it seems probable that his tragedy, by forcing Bonnard to express and marvellously celebrate a common experience, ensured his survival as an artist.
1969
1 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, London, Macmillan, 1951, p. 168; New York, Macmillan, 1951.
2 Stendhal, De L’Amour, Paris, Editions de Cluny, 1938, p. 43 (trans. by the author). Cf. Stendhal, Love, trans. G. and S. Sale, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics, 1975, p. 45; Viking Penguin Inc.
3 Quoted in Pierre Bonnard, London, Royal Academy Catalogue, 1966.