This review of Bonnard by Isabelle Cahn (Prestel) appears in the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The work of Pierre Bonnard has always raised questions about his place in the story of 20th-century art. Did he represent continuity Impressionism or was he merely a bourgeois decorator? Was he attempting anything new or simply sitting out avant-gardism? Was his refusal to acknowledge the events of his time selfish escapism or noble indifference? What made him loved by Matisse but loathed by Picasso? Bonnard was uninterested in such questions and was clear about himself: ‘I float between intimism and decoration; one doesn’t change oneself.’ The statement was somewhere between a challenge and a plea to be taken at his own estimation.
The personality of Bonnard has also raised questions. He had, viewed from the outside, an extraordinarily unruffled life, seemingly without incident. Born to a comfortably-off family in 1867, he lived through the Dreyfus Affair, economic depression and two world wars and no hint of them – or any upheaval – appeared on his canvases. When, during the Second World War, a Vichy official asked him to paint Marshal Pétain, Bonnard’s response was a sort of shoulder shrug: ‘If Marshal Pétain is a good model, I don’t mind doing it, but I reserve the right to destroy my work if I don’t like it.’ No hint of any attitude there towards the marshal’s collaborationist regime, only fidelity to painting.
In her bountifully illustrated and thighcrushingly weighty biography, Isabelle Cahn, a specialist on the Nabis, adds other personal details, but leaves plenty of room for more to be said. Bonnard liked powerful cars; he once danced with Josephine Baker; his admiration for Monet may have influenced his decision to buy a house near Giverny; he refused the Légion d’honneur; he acknowledged his shyness and confessed that he liked to express his emotions to his dogs and cats because they didn’t judge (indeed, perhaps as reward for this therapeutic service, his friend, Annette Vaillant, recalled that he always ‘gave the best pieces of meat on his plate to the dogs’). Running through everything, however, is his preternatural placidity.
The things that exercised him took place on the canvas. As he put it: ‘When one is young it is the object, the exterior world which excites, thrills you. Later it is the interior.’ As a young painter – and failed lawyer – the bustle of the Paris streets intrigued him, as did the problem of how to translate it through colour or lithographic crayon. Maurice Denis, a fellow member of the Nabis, stated that painting was always primarily ‘a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’: this definition was also a credo. Bonnard devoted his career to assembling colours in such a way that they could express his emotions.
Dining Room in the Country (1913), Pierre Bonnard. Photo: © Minneapolis Institute of Arts
One way to do that was to treat every part of the canvas as equally important. As Cahn notes, he painted canvases that mimic the movement of the eye – flickering, combining central and peripheral vision, and finding equal values of colour and light across a scene. To this he added radical angles and a rejection of traditional perspective that he learned from Japanese ukiyo-e prints, along with cropping informed by his interest in photography (he was a keen amateur). Cahn follows this same all-over method. She offers dabs on his diaries, flicks to his work designing advertising posters and illustrating books, moves on to his Japonisme (the critic Félix Fénéon nicknamed him ‘le Nabi très japonard’) and his gentle humour (as in Woman with a Cat, a painting of 1912 in which a cat is about to steal a fish from the subject’s plate), and lingers over his eroticism, his chromatic experiments and the meaning of his open windows.
And, of course, she returns again and again to Marthe, the figure in Woman with a Cat. When they first met, in 1893, she introduced herself to Bonnard as Marthe de Méligny, an orphan from a venerable Italian family; in fact, she was Maria Boursin, daughter of a French carpenter and a midwife. They moved in together six months later. The numerous pictures he made of her bathing and washing fulfilled, says Cahn, both his sensual urge and his need for pictorial problem-solving. Bonnard stressed that in painting the nude ‘a kind of struggle for life begins’, as multiple poses offer themselves ‘until one of them finally triumphs’. The motif was free from coercion and kink – as a friend remembered, Marthe took great pleasure in her washing and soaking: ‘She has always had the need to soap herself, to “groom” herself, rubbing herself with meticulous voluptuousness for hours.’
Still Life with Dog (c. 1912), Pierre Bonnard. Photo: © National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Marthe, whom Bonnard finally married after more than 30 years, was not the only important woman in his life. Vaillant also said that ‘Pierre is too sensitive to femininity, to its charms, to have not had weaknesses for other faces and other bodies.’ He had affairs with Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle, the wife of an army doctor who was at the front when they met, and Renée Monchaty, the partner of the American painter Harry Lachman: he painted both women repeatedly. There were, however, consequences beyond Marthe’s hurt: Monchaty committed suicide when she learned of Bonnard and Marthe’s marriage, though Cahn has nothing to say about whether this traumatic moment had any effect on Bonnard.
Bonnard’s elusiveness applies to his pictures too but here Cahn is assiduous in unpicking his brimming canvases. Tucked into his endlessly interpretable paintings are narratives that form around those figures half glimpsed in mirrors and through doorways that hide as well as reveal. Shapes emerge from the amorphousness of his terrace and garden paintings, and the assemblages of mundane household objects – tablecloths and crockery, curtains and floor tiles – are both studies in chromatic variation and images painted somewhere between memory and imagination. This poetic indeterminacy, as she notes, is why he was such an influence on painters such as Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon, Richard Diebenkorn and Peter Doig.
In the end, however, as Bonnard said in 1935, his art was all about ‘drawing one’s pleasure – painting one’s pleasure – powerfully expressing one’s pleasure’. And pleasure was a project he approached quietly but with the utmost seriousness.
Bonnard by Isabelle Cahn is published by Prestel Publishing.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.