Pierre Bonnard 1867-1947

Pierre Bonnard came from that strange generation that lived in the Victorian world as rebels partaking in the artistic and intellectual avant-garde and surviving to be an old master out of his time beyond the Second World War.

Bonnard by Alfred Natanson 1890
By Gisele Freund1946
In the early 1890s Bonnard was part of a group of artists who had studied at the Academie Julian they were all looking to mark out a space for themselves as innovators.  As students it seems they were only vaguely aware of the work of the Impressionists but it was the synthetic and symbolist tendency of Gauguin rather than the naturalism of impressionism that attracted them.  
Gauguin Bretonne praying 1894
Gauguin Christmas night 1894
It may seem strange to contemporary eyes but they also held Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
in very high regard. 
Puvis de Chavannes pastoral poetry 1896
Puvis de Chavannes a vision of antiquity 1887
This was true for most of the Post Impressionists before them including Pissaro.   Puvis de Chavannes was important to them for a number of reasons.   The flat areas of colour, simplified form and graphic stylisation of the figures that he employed particularly impressed them.  They were also indulging the fascination nineteenth century French artists had for Japanese prints. 
Eishosai Choki1795
Katsukawa Shunei  1781 
Chavannes had successfully synthesised their graphic style into his art. The Nabis, as they came to be known, saw how this technique allowed for spiritual and symbolic expression that they valued over appearances.   They had a number of names Nabis was their private name and it translates from Arabic and Hebrew as the prophets.  Bonnard and Vuillard came to be known as the Intimists and  most people including the impressionists saw them as part of the Symbolist movement.

There may seem to be a bit of a contradiction in the response to things Japanese.  The Impressionists had enjoyed the prints for their subject matter taken from the everyday scenes of ordinary people with no obvious allegorical or historical references.  They also enjoyed the freshness and implied speed of execution that they saw as being appropriate for modern life with all its rush and bustle.  Chavannes on the other hand saw how the graphic style could be used to make symbolic, historical and allegorical narratives work.

To our eyes the other great influence on the group may seem to be utterly at odds with Chavanne's rather stiff formalised compositions with their muted almost milky colour.  Paul S�rusier came back from Pont Aven in 1988 bearing his tiny painting Bois d'Amour 
Paul Serusier Bois d'Amour    CLICK BEFORE CHANGING RHS
Bonnard Nude in bath 1925
This painting by S�rusier became known by the group as their talisman.  They loved it because of its pure colour its quick strokes and for the fact that it was a subjective deformation of nature rather than a copy of it.  The common ground of Chavannes and S�rusier can be found in Gauguin and the symbolist tendency of the Pont Aven artists. On the one hand flat graphic style on the other very broken paint surfaces and dynamic brushstrokes. 

In Bonnard's work it is possible to see how even in the most open and colourful paintings such as Nude in the bath, there is still a tendency to flatten space to introduce distorted perspectives for example taking a very high viewpoint that seems to look down on objects.  In this way they are laid out as a decorative panel but unlike the prints they are highly transparent surfaces. 
Monet Waterlilies 1925
Monet Waterlilies 1925
There is a parallel here with Monet's Waterlilies where high viewpoints eliminate the horizon emphasising the painted surface.  However paradoxically the surface of crusted paint becomes transparent to the gaze we are sometimes confused as to whether we are looking down through water or through clouds that are reflected in the water but in any case we are set adrift in space despite the assertive objectness of the canvas.

His decorative panels and posters are more obviously influenced by the subdued colour and the symbolist elements of de Chavannes' murals and directly by Japanese prints.  Bonnard had an early success when he was commissioned to make a poster for Champagne France  1891 that was plastered all over Paris.   This poster makes use of this graphic tendency and has little stylistically to do with the colour of the paintings although the flattening is consistent.  After this success the magazine Revue Blanche 1894 commissioned him and many of his Nabi colleagues to design posters and covers. 

In the early 1890s Bonnard joined with his friend Vuillard to make the sets and posters for some very avant-garde events at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre.  These were largely symbolist performances of plays by Maeterlink, Strinberg and Ibsen but in 1896 he was involved in the production of Alfred Jarray's Ubu Roi an early example of the theatre of the absurd which is often attributed as a precursor of contemporary performance art.  
Alphabet du Pere Ubu in Alamanche
Alphabet du Pere Ubu in Alamanche
He made a number of illustrations of Pere Ubu in the next few years that have a Dada feel to them.  There was nothing of this in his painting however except that the sets they made at that time tended to be very flat often stark.   The flatness of the sets was often made more emphatic by an extreme rake of the stage making the horizon very high and forcing the cast to appear in an exaggerated high perspective.  This is one element that does feed into the composition of the paintings.

Eduard Vuillard was always Bonnard's closest friend and they continued to write detailed and intimate letters to each other long after their youthful collaborations.  You can see some of the same flattening and heightening of colour in these works of his;
Vuillard L�elegants 1891
Vuillard Interior with coutourriers 1893
Maurice Denis was something of a spokesman for the group and like Bernard at Pont Aven his more literal take on the theory stultified his work a bit.  In the case of Bernard his friend Gauguin once said in frustration that all this theory is bullshit.
Maurice Denis Septemeber evening 1891
Maurice Denis October evening 1891

Bonnard was at heart something of an aesthetic conservative and was probably always going to slowly move back towards a kind of naturalism however his palette remained influenced by the 'talisman' and he retained the open brushwork that allows his colour to resonate.   When Bonnard breaks his colour it is not illustrating some scientific principle such as the Impressionists believed would replicate the effects of light in the retina but it represents an expressive choice. 
None the less when he met many of the Impressionists at exhibitions of Caillabot's collection in 1997-8 he was impressed and began leaning heavily towards their naturalism.   He determined however to take their colourful renditions of nature and give them the graphic flattening treatment he had learned from the Japanese Chavannes and Gauguin.

At first glance however Bonnard's best known colourful renditions of Provencal light and the well-washed body of Marthe de M�ligny may seem to simply continue the work of the impressionists, and to a degree he would probably have gone along with that as the theme of the Canberra show suggests.  However his early association with the avant-garde introduced a freedom and subjectivity into the compositions that go beyond anything attempted by the Impressionists.  It would be perfectly easy to look at him as an intermediary between Monet and Matisse.
Monet Waterlilies 1925
Monet Waterlilies 1925

Matisse The red studio 1911
Matisse Odalisques 1928
His work overlaps the careers of both these artists and he saw a bit of Matisse later in his life when they were neighbors in the South of France.  In some ways Matisse could be seen as the logical successor to Bonnard.  But then he was also a contemporary of Picasso whose experiments with Cubism come when Bonnard was in mid career.  This juxtaposition makes him look rather anachronistic but history has not advanced in a monolithic sequence, after all Monet was painting his great late water lilies in 1925 when Picasso had briefly retreated into neoclassicism. 

In spite of his early adventures Bonnard could be described as a lover of beauty and of nature and to distance himself from intellectual experimentation and excessive content in his work.   He said as much about himself on occasion.  However his individualistic style stands in an important relation to the history of painting and viewed in a particular way he was not a universe away from the experiments of Cubism after all. 
Picasso Accordionist 1911
Braque Absinthe glass 1911
I am thinking about what Cubism means in a particular trajectory in which some schools of painters since the sixteenth century have worked with broad strokes of the brush breaking up fields of colour and using this energetic manner to animate the compositions and provide an element of interactivity with the viewer.  It is the engagement of the viewer in completing the image and the separation of the means of representation from an illusionistic or mimetic function that are at stake in Cubism but I will return to that later. 

A quick sample of artists since the Venetian colourists of the Renaissance may give an idea of how this happens;
Titian,  The rape of Europa 1556
Titian Diana and Acteon 1556
Rembrandt The Jewish Bride.1665
Rembrandt The Jewish Bride.1665
Velasquez Infanta Margueritta 1656
Velasquez detail of las Meninas  1656
Fragonard, The washerwomen  1761
Fragonard, The actor   1769
Constable, Study for the leaping Horse 1824
Constable, Study for Hadleigh castle  1829
Turner,  Norham castle sunrise 1840
Turner,   detail  Norham castle sunrise 1840
Gericault,  Possible SP 1820?
Gericault,  Start of the race of the Barberi horses 1817
Delacroix, The sea from the heights of Dieppe  1852
Delacroix, detail of battle of taillebourg  1834
CourbetThe wave
Courbet The sleepers 1866
all worked with varying degrees of broken paint before impressionism.   Each of them had their own reasons for the use of the rough method as it was sometimes known, in Rembrandt's case it was a search for a tactile equivalent Courbet also tried to get this quality into his brushwork particularly in his depiction of water where he used varnish in the paint to lubricate it a spread it on with a palette knife.  While they all created images that are based on the visible or imaginable world they did not seek to make a seamless illusion of it but to create a presence in paint that captured something of the sensation of being there. 

Pollock at work 1952
Pollock  Naked man with knife 1938
It became fashionable in the late 20th century to denigrate the value of the hand of the artist.  The extremes of the abstract expressionists such as the flamboyance of Jackson Pollock came to epitomize the idea that the gesture of the artist's hand signified a claim on genius and overplayed the cult of the individual.   While there is an element of truth in this perception it is a limited view of the work and misses an important component that is not about the painter but about the viewer.   Vasari already noted in the 16thC that with Titian's late paintings require the viewer to move back and forth to find a point of resolution for the image.   Vasari concluded that the image was finally interpreted (completed) within the viewer and that this embodiment of the experience gave it an additional affective power. 

Velasquez Pope innocent X 1650
Velasquez King Phillip 1644
Velasquez clearly works his surfaces to move the viewer's gaze around the image often defying the logic of focal length in favour of an affective response.  Each of the artists above to some degree manipulates the viewer's space and makes us conscious of the act of viewing itself. 

Gerhard RichterClaudius 1986
Gerhard RichterEmma  1992
Gerhard Richter provides a contemporary and exemplary extension of this tendency.  In his paintings there is always a sense that the image whether it is abstract or figurative has been conceived through the lens of a camera.   He often blurs the image as if it is out of focus or as if the camera has moved.  This has a distancing effect in one sense but in a strange way it causes the viewer to see the process of looking to become self-reflexive even if it is subliminal in its effect.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the issue of finish was raised, some asked if a Delacroix painting of broken slashes of colour or a swirling mass of paint in Turner could be considered a finished picture or was it just a sketch?  C�zanne faced this kind of criticism when he left areas of canvas bare.  Most 20th C critics have come to accept loosely finished works as an established stylistic device but more importantly the open brushwork and even the incomplete drawing provide a point of entry into the image inviting the viewer to make good the traces the artist gives us.  This is not about style or fashion but a way of seeing that has its roots in the Renaissance and has survived the centuries often in the face of public incomprehension.

Bonnard Nude in theThe Bath (1936)
Bonnard Nu de dos � la toilette (1934
Bonnard embraced this tradition and took it to an exquisite condition at the limit of recognition; the image still directly evokes the sensation of the presence of things even as it dissolves into light.  These paintings by Bonnard depict his wife Marthe de M�ligny in the privacy of their home.  The brushwork is open, his loose dry strokes always transparent to our eye.  For example Nu de Dos � la Toilette, 1934 where the openness of the painted surface makes the flesh glow with an inner light.  Not only is the surface open but also the boundary of the figure is very softly defined.   The back of the figure virtually merges with the brightly lit wall behind her.  Our visual comprehension of the figure is only possible when it is seen as a whole with the rest of the composition.  If you were to isolate any portion of the figure it would become unreadable. 
Bonnard The Bathroom 1932
Bonnard Nude with mirror 1931
Bonnard The window 1925
Bonnard Interior with a woman in a wicker chair 1920
By opening the figure to the passage of light and dissolving figure/ground distinctions Bonnard parallels aspects of Analytic Cubism.  Like Picasso, Bonnard makes the figure merge with the painted field.  The figure is quite literally opened up for our gaze.

Picasso and Braque again 1911
In developing analytical Cubism Picasso and Braque had systematically separated the visual means of representing form from its objects.  In the most extreme paintings of 1909-10 we can see perspectival distortion, layering of forms and overlapping edges, tonal contrasts, cross hatching in fact all the tools of the illustrative artist's trade but they are no longer being used to describe things - they are now working as disembodied elements of representation floating freely as compositional elements.  Picasso came to the brink of abstraction and pulled back.  Like Bonnard in the end he was interested in showing us his world.   Where Bonnard followed his love of nature including Marthe's body Picasso had freed himself to invent his own world of distortions in the service of psychological obsessions, in a sense he became a kind of illustrator of the psyche while Bonnard continued to rejoice in the world of observable sensation.