Disquieting and Enraptured: On Pierre Bonnard (Page 2)

"The Third Mind" succeeds in showing that Asian culture influenced American culture profoundly. But did it exert greater influence in America than in Europe? I'd say that the influence was broader here than across the Atlantic. Asia was an influence on American art mostly because Asian culture was an influence on American culture; European Modernism might not have existed if not for Asian art, but the influence was specifically pictorial and had little to do with Zen, Vedanta or other religious or philosophical systems. By the end of the nineteenth century, artists had begun to suspect that representation as it had developed in the West was becoming a dead letter; the discovery of Japanese prints opened their eyes to other ways of organizing an image.

Pierre Bonnard, who was born in 1867 in a southwestern suburb of Paris and died in 1947 in Le Cannet, near the Riviera, was one of the first of these artists, and one of the most extreme; to his friend the writer Félix Fénéon he became "Bonnard, très Japonard." Today we forget the urgency with which the painters of the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century sought to reject the tradition of which they now seem an essential part. We forget, for instance, Matisse's disdain for "those wrongly termed Renaissance masters...of more physical than spiritual value." If there was an ideology connected with this pictorial revolt--so different from the well-mannered japonisme of 1890s Boston--it was anarchism; society, too, had to be organized along entirely different lines. Fénéon was tried as a bomb thrower, and although he was acquitted, his most recent biographer suspects that he was not innocent. Munroe, in her introduction to the catalog of "The Third Mind," gestures dismissively toward japonisme as "a well-documented practice of formal appropriation"--anything to do with form must be in bad odor these days, as we all know--but it's not clear that those mere "flat colors, simple forms, and bold outlines" had less artistic power than all the philosophies in the world. The prints that inspired the Modernists were a "low" and popular art form, and they led to the rise of commercial graphics as a serious art in the early work of Bonnard and then, in his wake, of Toulouse-Lautrec and others.

Textbooks trap Bonnard in the fin de siècle, though it's always been obvious to those who have looked deeper that his best work came later, in the last quarter-century of his life, the period gloriously on view in "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 19. While the symphonies of blurs and dabs that are his late paintings seem worlds away from his hard-edged graphic style of the 1890s, they have something in common: the overturning of naturalistic space. Early and late, Bonnard pieces space together like a puzzle whose solution is always different: each piece of the puzzle is equally present, equally elusive. He remained très japonard. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who admired the painter and photographed him in the 1940s, saw his self-effacement as "in keeping with Buddhism. Bonnard had something of the bonze in him." We glimpse this monastic figure in the painter's late self-portraits, a couple of which are included here despite their hardly being still lifes or interiors.

Looking at these paintings, in which attention is so effectively diffused and the figure, while rarely quite absent, is usually tangential, one is tempted to see the work of a formalist. But, of course, there is some subject matter in them--domestic life, let's say. And precisely because the subject matter is so limited, there is also another temptation, opposite to the formalist one: to read the paintings as a diary of the painter's feelings about his home and about the woman with whom he lived for nearly fifty years, Marthe de Méligny, the recurrent figure in the paintings.

Bonnard and Marthe lived a strange life together. She was a recluse and something of a hypochondriac; her weakness was her power in the relationship. The painter's power, by contrast, was his ability to pass unnoticed, to be present without seeming to be present, to look without seeming to look. In a few moments he could hastily make a notational sketch from which he would later derive a grand painting that might take years to finish--one in which everything seems to be seen out of the corner of his eye as he's turning his head. "Unencumbered by the artist's usual paraphernalia," as Dita Amory writes in the exhibition catalog, "Bonnard could easily squeeze into the tightest spots...pencil and daybook in hand, and make himself virtually one with a room." His method was a highly disciplined quietism. As David Sylvester once said, "One cannot imagine him arranging a still life on a table in order to make a picture of it; he would have painted the still life that happened to be there, rearranging it on the canvas, perhaps, but not interfering with the actual things." Likewise for the nude, Sylvester continued, Bonnard's attitude "demanded that she should not notice him." Not only are the figures in the painting easy to overlook; so is the figure whose viewpoint the paintings represent.

Bonnard's paintings are about his life, but in a curiously furtive and equivocal sense. Look at the great White Interior of 1932. You'll see a door, a radiator, a table, a chair...and only very gradually will you see a figure, presumably Marthe leaning over behind the table, busy with a cat. Bonnard painted people in such a summary, often doll-like fashion that it is sometimes difficult to positively identify them. Seeing Marthe, or not, is a trick of the eye. She is the painting's secret. The nineteenth-century American painter Abbott Handerson Thayer, a pioneer of military camouflage, wrote to his patron Charles Lang Freer praising the Japanese manner: "Instead of a tiger painted against a contrasting background as our so-called painters give us, in an oriental tiger picture...one finds the tiger, subtly comprised in the decoration." What Bonnard does is not unrelated--but the emphasis is more on the shock of recognition than on the subtlety of comprising. Thayer's imaginary tiger is toothless; Bonnard's indolent women can wound. Bonnard once explained, "I'm trying to do what I have never done, give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing." This seeing everything and at the same time seeing nothing is not simply an optical state; it is a social and psychological one, like that of the eponymous protagonist of What Maisie Knew. Often referred to as a Proustian painter because he painted from memory rather than from life, Bonnard is even more a Jamesian one. In what sense did Bonnard and Marthe know each other, this couple we can only picture slipping past each other in silence for half a century? Bonnard only learned late in life, for instance, that Marthe's very name had been an invention. Bonnard teaches lessons in unknowing.

There is nothing disinterested or neutral about these paintings, which is why the temptation to see Bonnard as a formalist must be resisted even more strongly than the temptation to see the paintings as a diary of the painter's life--which the paintings never really tell you anything about. There is deep emotion here, but it's all caught up in the paint, despite not being about the paint. Everything smolders. Color is overheated, even lurid. The deepest shadows seem to have a fire burning within them. The glow of these paintings is that of iron in the forge, each ingot ready to be bent or hammered on the anvil. For all the apparent softness of things, their blurred and smudged edges, they have been fitted together with a will, worked patiently and hard so as to be pressed into the pictorial grid. The paintings are disquieting and enraptured all at once, but they never want to tell you why.

Only once, really, does Bonnard give more than a glimpse of what his art is about, but then it's heartbreaking. Young Women in the Garden was begun around 1921, when Bonnard--who had been living with Marthe for nearly thirty years--fell in love with a young woman named Renée Monchaty. She is the central figure in the picture. Bonnard was ready to marry her, but Marthe got wind of it and broke up the affair; she was the one who married the painter, finally, in 1925, whereupon Renée killed herself. At Marthe's insistence, Bonnard destroyed most of the paintings he'd made of Renée, but he saved this one, still unfinished. Marthe died in 1942; a few years later he began working on the painting again, adding Marthe's face at the edge of the canvas, as though she, rather than he, was quietly, almost unnoticeably observing Renée. His reluctance to paint Marthe straight-on marks the depth of his identification with her. Has bad conscience ever been so strangely transmuted into beauty?n

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