Giving In To Pierre Pleasure

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 15, 1998

JOHN McDONALD

Greater than Matisse? Greater than Picasso? After decades of derision and neglect, it's time to pay tribute to one of the masters of 20th-century art.

BONNARD

by Sarah Whitfield et al Tate Gallery Publishing (Thames & Hudson Australia) Hardcover, 272 pp, $105

ISBN I 85437 2432

BONNARD

by Timothy Hyman

Thames & Hudson Paperback, 224 pp, $19.95

ISBN 0-500-20310-5

THIS will be the last of my regular Saturday art columns for 1998. After five years of halting progress on a new history of Australian art for Penguin, I have decided to take a sabbatical from the Herald and work solidly on the manuscript.

I've enjoyed writing these columns, and I owe a debt to the former editor-in-chief, John Alexander, who backed the idea of a weekly piece that was more of an essay than a review. It has allowed an opportunity to look at the visual arts in a depth that was unprecedented in an Australian newspaper. I must also acknowledge all those who sent appreciative letters that I never found time to answer. Those who wrote in anger and complaint should enjoy my absence.

This is not intended to be a permanent retirement, although it can only be healthy for this column to be opened up to some different perspectives. During the next year I will continue to contribute articles on an irregular basis, when time and topic permit.

It is slightly disappointing that the most popular articles have been those in which I have put the boot into some particularly dopey exhibition, usually at the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Art Gallery of NSW. As every critic knows, it is much easier to write a negative review than a positive one, and one must resist the temptation to play to the gallery by launching a weekly volley of Exocets.

With this in mind, I have decided to end on a high note, by writing about an artist I have always revered - Pierre Bonnard, the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (until October 13). I will not get to see the exhibition, even though I may regret it forever. Instead, I'll be looking at two new publications on the artist: the retrospective catalogue, with essays by Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield; and Timothy Hyman's excellent short monograph in Thames & Hudson's "World of Art" series.

At the end of the 20th century, it is heartening that Bonnard (1867-1947) is being honoured with a retrospective. With the possible exception of Andre Derain, no great modern artist has suffered such neglect and derision in the years after his death. On the other hand, few artists of any age have been capable of inspiring such passionate devotion from his admirers. Among local artists, one thinks immediately of William Robinson, Kevin Connor and Tom Carment, who owe an immense debt to Bonnard. To many of his devotees, he is simply the greatest painter of the century - greater than Matisse, who held him in the highest esteem, greater than Picasso, who had a terminal aversion to his work.

In fact, the slump in Bonnard's reputation in the years after the war is partly due to Picasso's contempt. Hyman quotes Picasso's complaints to Francoise Gilot: "Don't talk to me about Bonnard. That's not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn't know how to choose . . . The result is a potpourri of indecision . . . Painting can't be done that way. Painting isn't a question of sensibility: it's a question of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice."

How typical it is of Picasso to see painting as a kind of military junta, toppling nature from her throne. It seems to typify the modernist ethos of never-ending revolution, in which new styles keep stealing the limelight from the old. In the career of Picasso, the archetypal modernist, one sees a microcosm of this process, with contradictory styles succeeding one another in rapid succession.

Nineteenth-century sentimentality gives way to neo-primitivism. This style, in turn, is supplanted by the abstracted forms of Cubism, which is superseded by Neo-Classicism, and so on.

Bonnard, too, had his classical fixations. One of the most fascinating aspects of the retrospective catalogue is to see how much he borrowed from antique statues. He had a life-long love of the Greek classical tradition, and used poses taken from marble statues in the Louvre for many of his wildest bathroom pictures. Yet at no stage did he demonstrate any attraction to the African tribal sculpture, which became one of the leading catalysts for early modernism.

This offers support for Picasso's claim that Bonnard was not a modern painter, and for the derision that his work inspired in critics such as Christian Zervos, who was one of Picasso's most influential acolytes.

Shortly after Bonnard's death, Zervos wrote a damning appraisal of his work in the magazine Cahiers d'Art. From a doctrinaire position, it served to expel him from the modernist camp, portraying him as a relic of the 19th century. It was true enough that the aging Bonnard had shown little interest in avant-garde theories and fashions. On the other hand, Picasso, who is often portrayed as the supreme individualist in modern art, was keenly aware of burgeoning trends. If we believe Michael FitzGerald in the book Making Modernism, he also possessed a shrewd understanding of his own market.

Throughout his life, Bonnard seemed to grow only more self-contained and reclusive. He developed a dread of unfamiliar objects and people, painting hundreds of pictures of his own house and his wife, Marthe. At a midway point in his career, in 1914, he suffered a crisis of confidence and decided he had to begin all over again, teaching himself to paint, and especially to draw. Looking for the form and structure he felt his art had lost, he drew like a demon, making loose, rapid sketches that formed the bases of future paintings. As he withdrew progressively from the Paris art scene, Bonnard set out on a path that took him ever further from the concerns of the avant-garde. For instance, he did not privilege form over content, but sought a unique fusion of the two terms. His subject matter was modern, domestic and neutral, but his treatment has an extraordinary emotional density.

While an earlier generation posed nudes in sylvan forests and sumptuous boudoirs, Bonnard preferred a modern bathroom, with white-tiled walls and black-and-white tiles on the floor. In late masterpieces such as Nude in the Bath (1936) that bathroom becomes ablaze with hallucinogenic colour. Every nuance of daylight is translated into a mottled patch of yellow, pink or gold; shadows are many shades of blue or purple.

One of the most remarkable aspects of these works is that hot and cool colours seem to swap values; it becomes possible to see blue as a warm colour, and yellow as cool and recessive. Each work is a lesson in the relativity of colour perception - the way one tone can influence our sense of another. This is also because Bonnard's colours are always impure, composed of many individual touches that keep each plane shifting in front of the eye. Needless to say, this is an aspect that never emerges in reproduction, and is one of the reasons some people discover these pictures with the force of revelation. No book or poster will ever prepare one for the first-hand impact of such a painting.

To the organisers of the current retrospective, all this creates a persuasive case for Bonnard to be considered one of the seminal figures in modern art.

Their selection of work concentrates on the late paintings to the virtual exclusion of important early works, when he was associated with the Nabis - a group of young artists who took their aesthetic gospel from Gauguin, and their name from a Hebrew word meaning "prophet" or "redeemer". From the start, Bonnard and his close friend Edouard Vuillard seem to have been uncomfortable with the quasi-religious ideals of comrades such as Maurice Denis and Paul Serusier.

Although he tailored his paintings and prints in accordance with the Nabis' ideals of decorative flatness, Bonnard was more drawn to the life of the street in its bustling depth and confusion. He admired Japanese woodblock prints for their worldliness as much as for their flat compositions and bold colour.

One of the achievements of Timothy Hyman's book is to situate the young Bonnard in the midst of the intellectual and political currents of the age. He shows how Bonnard responded to the influence of friends such as the anarchist critic Felix Feneon, or the eccentric playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry. As well as designing theatrical sets, Bonnard completed more than a hundred savage, witty pen drawings of Jarry's monstrous doppelgaEnger of the French bourgeoisie, Pere Ubu.

Hyman also relates Bonnard's work to the poetry of Mallarme, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which the Nabis are known to have read. Both thinkers are relevant to the way Bonnard's work would develop, in its attempt to capture ecstatic, transient moments of being and its quietly tragic consciousness of the present dissolving into the past. Bergson distinguished physical time (le temps ) from time as it is experienced (la duree), and this distinction is crucial to our understanding of Bonnard's late work. He is a painter of la duree, who leaves the outlines of objects soft and fuzzy, sometimes to the point of unrecognisability. It is as though we see Bonnard's world only with our peripheral vision, having already shifted our focus elsewhere. His colours are stained by the after-images of the last place we laid our eyes. The effect, as many have noted, is one of pleasurable disintegration. The feeling is tentatively expressed by the Spanish painter Miguel Barcelo, quoted in Sarah Whitfield's catalogue essay: "What is perverse in Bonnard is the blend of happiness . . . with a sort of decomposition, a sort of overdose."

Not only does Bonnard expose us to a completely subjective vision of the world and the passing of time, he imbues this vision with a sense of intoxication. He is drunk on the way light flickers on bathroom tiles or spreads itself across a table cloth. Only the figure of Marthe resists the ravages of time: no matter how old and ill she becomes, Bonnard paints her as a young woman, floating in the tub. The fact that the tub also resembles a sarcophagus only emphasises Bonnard's wish to embalm and preserve an image of serene, sensuous beauty that bore little relation to Marthe's real life, which was one long nightmare of pulmonary disease and neurosis.

With himself, Bonnard tends to exaggerate time's brutalities. In some of the late self-portraits he is not simply old, but ancient, his bald head resembling a ball of raw meat, his eyes lost in dark, sunken hollows. "The longing now," writes Whitfield, "is for a death that comes as a release." Yet even in these ruthless images the colour has a vitality that resists all thoughts of melancholy. Even as time drags him into oblivion, Bonnard is fascinated by its inexorable, purposeful actions. It is fitting that his famous final work is a painting of an almond tree in bloom - the perfect epitaph for a sensibility that was able to renew itself by drawing such boundless, mysterious reserves of energy from a small corner of the visible world.

One learns little about Bonnard's "ecstasies" in John Elderfield's contribution to the retrospective catalogue, which makes the artist into theoretical proposition. This dense and rather dull essay is a close investigation of the perceptual aspects of Bonnard's work. Elderfield has his moments, but one can only question the relevance of some of the more pedantic passages.

Whitfield's essay is similarly long-winded in its descriptions of paintings, but it contains much information on Bonnard that has never previously appeared in English. The highlight is an illuminating discussion of Bonnard's reluctance to work from the motif. He preferred to draw on the run, and dream the motif back into existence in the studio. When Maillol sent his favourite model, Dina Vierny, over to pose for Bonnard, he asked her to walk around and "live". The idea of a fixed pose made him uncomfortable, as if he lacked the will to objectify a model, in the conventional manner. For the most part, he seemed to feel that a person or an object posed a threat to his own subjectivity. He praised Cezanne, Renoir and Monet as artists "who knew how to defend themselves in front of nature". He preferred Titian, "who had a total defence against the motif", to Velasquez, who made a more faithful rendition of the objects in front of his eyes.

Bonnard was arguing on behalf of the transforming power of the artist's imagination, for the fact that the artist's perception of an object is very different from its physical nature. With a great artist such as Titian, motifs reach beyond appearances, to a dream-like state where both manifest and latent meanings may be sensed, if not immediately grasped.

There is a long tradition of this dream-like transformation of the everyday, which acts as an aside to the gradual progress of naturalism. One sees it in the work of Duccio, and Flemish masters such as Patinir and Brueghel; it is there in Rembrandt and the Tiepolos. In the 20th century it forms an alternative tradition to modernist abstraction, in artists such as Balthus and Bonnard, yet it never collapses into the overt theatricality of Dada and Surrealism.

I am describing a nuance rather than a category, an intuition rather than a style, but it is a quality that has always held an irresistible seduction for the eye. It is also a feature of many of the artworks Hyman has written about over the years, from those of Gian Domenico Tiepolo to James Ensor. Hyman, who is first a painter, would be my choice as Britain's most interesting art writer, and his book on Bonnard is a wonderful piece of sustained reflection that may be read more quickly and enjoyably than either essay in the retrospective catalogue. One is always aware of Hyman's excitement in front of Bonnard's work, although that fund of sympathy does not lead to a hagiography but a lucid analysis. In probing the solitude of this intensely private artist, he uncovers insights that are fundamental to the ongoing health of painting.