Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch
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aspects of the subject that is being depicted, and secondly, objective misinterpretation ensuring the depiction finds its place in the fundamental order of the work. Their art is characterized by an absence of perspective and the use of pure tones and shades. They would all attempt to overcome the barrier between easel painting and decorative art, experimenting with illustration, wallpaper, stained-glass windows, tapestry, furnishings… The Nabis group united artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Ker Xavier Roussel, Georges Lacombe, the sculptor Aristide Maillol and even Maurice Denis who claimed that, “before a painting is turned into a battle horse, a naked woman, or becomes any sort of trivial detail, it is essentially just a flat surface covered with colors that are assembled in a certain order.”And yet they addressed one another with the formal “vous”, while Bonnard addressed other members of the Nabi group with “tu”.
In the 1890s Bonnard was by no means a recluse. He loved to go for long walks with Roussel, even listened with pleasure to Denis’s lengthy tirades, although he remained rather taciturn himself. He was sociable in the best sense of the word. One of his humorous reminiscent drawings (1910) shows the Place Clichy, the centre of the quarter where young artists, light-hearted and somewhat Bohemian, usually congregated. Bonnard, Vuillard and Roussel are unhurriedly crossing the square. Some distance away, Denis is bustling along with a folder under his arm. Towards them, from the opposite direction, comes Toulouse-Lautrec, swinging a thick walking-stick. Toulouse-Lautrec was well disposed towards Bonnard and Vuillard. From time to time he would take their paintings, hire a carriage and drive to the art-dealers whom he knew personally. It was not easy to get them interested, though. Toulouse-Lautrec greatly admired Bonnard’s poster France-Champagne published in 1891. Bonnard took the artist to his printer, Ancours, in whose shop Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge was printed later the same year followed by his other famous posters. The poster France-Champagne, commissioned by the wine-dealer Debray in 1889 was to play a special role in Bonnard’s life. This work brought him his first emoluments. The sum was miserably small compared with the earnings of the then much feted artist Jean Meissonnier, but it convinced Bonnard that painting could provide him with a living. This small success coincided with failure in his university examinations. Perhaps he was deliberately burning his boats, abandoning a career in business for the sake of art. On 9 March 1891 he wrote to his mother: “I won’t be able to see my poster on the walls just yet. It will only appear at the end of the month. But as I finger the hundred francs in my pocket, I must admit I feel proud”.[3]
Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait, 1889. Tempera on cardboard, 21.5 × 15.8 cm, Private Collection.
Pierre Bonnard, The Life of the painter, Pages from a drawing book. Pencil and fountain pen wash, around 1910. Private Collection.
Pierre Bonnard, The Bridge, 1896–1897. Lithograph in 4 colours, 27 × 41 cm.
At about the same time he sent five pictures to the Salon des Indépendants. At the close of 1891 he exhibited his works together with Toulouse-Lautrec, Bernard, Anquetin and Denis at Le Barc de Boutteville’s. When a journalist from Echo de Paris, who interviewed the artists at the exhibition, asked Bonnard to name his favourite painters, he declined to do so. He said that he did not belong to any school. His idea was to bring off something of his own and he was trying to forget all that he had been taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
One more event in 1891 played an important role in Bonnard’s life. The journal Revue Blanche moved its editorial office from Brussels to Paris. Bonnard and other members of the Nabi group soon established a good relationship with the publisher Thadée Natanson, another former student of the Lycée Condorcet. Natanson managed to get the most gifted artists, writers and musicians to work for him. The frontispieces of the journal were designed by Bonnard and Vuillard; inside there were the latest poems of Mallarmé, works by Marcel Proust and Strindberg, Oscar Wilde and Maxim Gorky; Debussy also contributed. On the pages of the Revue Blanche literary critics discussed the works of Leo Tolstoy. Natanson himself devoted his first article to Utamaro and Hiroshige. Without exaggeration, the Revue Blanche was the best French cultural periodical of the 1890s. The atmosphere in its editorial office, which the Nabis often visited, was stimulating. Natanson’s personal support for the artists was also of no small importance. He was as young as the artists whom he backed and was not afraid to follow his own inclinations. Even Natanson’s friends later admitted that at times they had doubts whether they could trust a person who decorated his home with works by Bonnard and Vuillard.
Pierre Bonnard, The Little Laundry Girl, 1896. Lithograph in 5 colours, 30 × 19 cm, Paris, National Library.
Natanson’s printed reminiscences of Bonnard give perhaps one of the best pen-portraits of the artist. “Bonnard, when I first met him, was a gaunt young man who sometimes stooped. He had very white slightly protruding front teeth, was timid and short-sighted. His dark brown rather thin side-whiskers curled slightly; perched on his nose, very close to his eyes with the dark pupils, was a small pince-nez in an iron frame, as was the fashion at the close of the nineteenth century. He spoke little, but was always ready to show the portrait of his fat grandmother in whose house he lived when he first came to Paris. The portrait had been painted in the Dauphiné and depicted the old lady with several white hens pecking at some feed close to her skirts. My new friend behaved in a very guarded manner when it came to discussing theories in painting, but he readily spoke about Japanese prints of which he was very fond. At that time such a taste could be easily satisfied. He also preferred checked fabrics far more than any other kind. His smile, with his white teeth showing slightly, was so winning that you wanted to see it again and to hold on to it. You wanted to catch the moment when it appeared. Bonnard smiled out of politeness, because of his shyness, but once he had tamed his smile, so to speak, he was no longer inhibited, and it was as if a tensioned spring had unwound… Bonnard hardly changed from the early days of our friendship. He rarely livened up, even more rarely expressed his mind openly, avoiding any possible chance of letting his feelings come out into the open.”[4]
“He was the humorist among us,” Lugné-Poë recalled. “His light-hearted jollity and wit can be seen in his canvases”.[5] “Wonderfully gifted, but too intelligent to let us feel his superiority, he was able to hide the spark of genius within him,”[6] was Verkade’s recollection of him. Bonnard’s humour was perhaps not always taken as harmless. The Russian artist Alexander Benois said that his acquaintance with the painter in the late 1890s was short-lived because Bonnard’s specifically French esprit gouailleur (mocking wit) made him feel ill at ease.[7] But Benois’s reaction is exceptional. There was nothing of the born joker about Bonnard, and as he grew older he became increasingly reserved, even somewhat distrustful of others. In fact, throughout his life, even when he was a member of the Nabi group, he required the company of others less than his own; or rather what he needed was to be left alone with his art. Natanson was right when he said that Bonnard’s misanthropy sprang from his innate kindness.[8] But even in his youth Bonnard was probably a more complex personality than he seemed to his friends. His reserve and reticence hid traits which one could hardly suspect. In his self-portrait painted in 1889 (Private Collection, Paris) we see not a light-minded wit, but a watchful, diffident young man. The still eyes hide thoughts one does not usually share with others. His acquaintances saw him as a fine, jolly fellow. And that was true enough. But was that all? With age, other hidden features of his nature became more evident. At thirty, when Benois met him, he was a different man from the one he was at the age of twenty: he was less light-hearted and showed less desire to surprise with paradoxes. So many of his early compositions were deliberately paradoxical.
Pierre Bonnard, The Children’s Lunch, c. 1906. Oil on wood 27 × 33,5 cm, Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
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Perucchi-Petri,
Th. Natanson,
A. Terrasse,
Dom W. Verkade,
A. Benois,
Th. Natanson,