Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch
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active, checked areas with calm, empty spaces. Art historians often look on the use of checked areas in Bonnard’s early work as an extreme manifestation of his Japanism. We can, indeed, find something similar in Japanese prints, but the artist did not invent ornaments, rather he was stimulated when in the real world he came across the things he liked. (His sister Andrée also loved check fabrics: the pattern of her tartan dress, in which blue and red predominated, determines the main colour characteristics of a whole painting.) There should be no doubt that the very ordinary fence depicted in the picture Behind the Fence really existed. “You know, there is nothing in Bonnard’s work that has not come from observation,” Natanson noted.[18]
The middle of the 1890s saw a gradual change in Bonnard’s art. Having begun as a convinced Post-Impressionist he now moved closer to the Impressionists, above all to Degas. In 1894 he painted a series of pictures devoted to horse-racing; in 1896 he turned to scenes in cafés and portrayed ballet-dancers; in 1897 he produced several circus scenes. The influence of Degas is evident in all these works. Bonnard did not reject the conventions of Japanese art, but adapted them to serve his own purposes: in his increasingly more realistic approach to the object of representation, his rendering of light, air and the depth of space. Pissarro, who had expressed dissatisfaction with Bonnard’s early work, now voiced a different opinion in a letter to his son. In 1898 Bonnard received a letter from Renoir following the publication of Peter Nansen’s novel Marie. Renoir expressed his admiration for Bonnard’s illustrations for the book: “You possess the gift of charming. Do not neglect it. You will come across more powerful painters, but your gift is precious.”[19] When staying in the south, Bonnard made a point of visiting Cagnes to call on the old master. The little painting with a dedication, which Renoir gave him, was Bonnard’s pride and one of his most cherished possessions. When Bonnard moved to Vernon, he struck up a closer acquaintance with Claude Monet who lived in Giverny only a few miles away. Bonnard went to Giverny to enjoy Monet’s beautiful garden, to look at the landscapes with water lilies on which the leader of the Impressionists was then working, and to see again the canvases by Delacroix, Corot, Cézanne and Renoir in his collection. From time to time Monet’s car drove up to Bonnard’s house called “Ma Roulotte” (my gypsy-wagon). Monet wanted to see Bonnard’s latest work. They spoke little, but Bonnard was content with a smile or an encouraging gesture from Monet. Bonnard continued seeing Monet and Renoir in later years, long after these two very discriminating elder masters had recognized their younger colleague as a painter of considerable standing. At the turn of the century Bonnard seems to have been at a crossroads. He might have continued his experiments in decorative painting. He might have concentrated his attention on an ironical and psychological approach to the subject, not unlike that of Toulouse-Lautrec. (His Terrasse Family provides an excellent example of his capacity in that direction.) He might have yielded to the temptations of sensual subjects exemplified by the series of nudes he painted in 1899–1900. He might have focused on portraiture: his few efforts in that line reveal him as an astute student of the human soul. In fact, however, most of the works he created at that time and in the following decade show no marked preference for any one of these traditional genres. Nor do they show any extreme tendency in the treatment of the motif whether decorative, naturalistic or psychological. Later Bonnard would write to the art critic Georges Besson: “I am drifting between the intimate and the decorative.”[20] Only a small number of Bonnard’s works produced in the 1980s-1900s may be unreservedly classified as belonging to one particular genre: portrait, nude or landscape. His landscapes, for instance, generally contain people who are as important a part of the picture as the surrounding scenery. Looking at his townscapes one tends to wonder what attracted the artist more – the Parisian streets or their colourful crowds. In the majority of cases Bonnard does not single out either. The artist treats the streets with their specifically Parisian hustle and bustle and wealth of colour as a mixture of landscape and genre scene forming a single whole. With Bonnard’s indoor scenes, we seem to face the same question. It is far from easy to decide whether we are looking at a depiction of a room enlivened by the presence of a human figure, or a genre scene where the interior serves as a background.
Pierre Bonnard, The Chequered Blouse, 1892. Oil on canvas, 61 × 33 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
It was, in fact, quite natural for Bonnard to combine several genres in one picture. An excellent example of this is his Mirror in the Dressing-Room (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow). The painting is considered a still life, but the elements of interior, portrait and nude are stronger than they should be in that case. This places the work in a class of its own among European painting of the early twentieth century. During this period Bonnard drew noticeably closer to the Impressionists. In their works, particularly in Degas’s, he found numerous examples of an unorthodox attitude to genres. His affinity with the Impressionists expressed itself in the fact that landscape, which always predominated in Impressionist art, became an ever more important element of his painting. Moreover, it is also important to note that in his landscapes Bonnard no longer strove after decorative effect, at least that was no longer his main objective. His Landscape in the Dauphiné in the Hermitage resembles a casual Impressionistic-style “snapshot view”. The composition does not appear to follow a preconceived scheme and it is easy to imagine how it continues on either side. The painting has none of the earlier flatness; the eye is led far into the distance. The landscape, however, lacks the Impressionist luminosity. Unlike the Impressionists for whom light was of paramount importance, Bonnard valued colour above all. The Landscape in the Dauphiné does not attract attention immediately. It takes time to appreciate the modest beauty of the rather dirty green colours. Bonnard managed to catch the hues of the somewhat prosaic Dauphiné countryside, seen, as it were, through the eyes of a peasant. That is not to say that the treatment of the subject reflects the usual aesthetic tastes of peasants, who would probably not like the landscape. It is more the psychological aspect, a specific sense of place. To some degree, at least, Bonnard perceives the world as it is seen by his characters themselves – in the case of this painting by peasants working in the fields on a rainy autumn day.
Another illustration of Bonnard’s ability to look at whatever he was depicting through the eyes of his characters is his townscape A Corner of Paris. In the centre of the composition is a small group of children out for a walk. The ingenuous curiosity and wonder with which they see the surrounding world is echoed by the bright posters pasted on a large board. The humorous notes discernible in paintings like A Corner of Paris are absent in the landscapes containing no human figures, such as the two paintings of the Seine near Vernon, one in Moscow, the other in St Petersburg. It is noteworthy that landscapes of this type are both more lyrical and less decorative. In general, Bonnard’s works are usually more decorative when they contain human figures.
It was when Bonnard was working on his Corner of Paris that the Fauves caught the public eye. Bonnard’s paintings were less bright than the works of the Impressionists; next to the garish creations of the Fauves, constructed on a rolling crescendo of colours, they looked utterly faded, even timid. This impression was, of course, deceptive, and Matisse, the leader of the Fauves, was well aware of this. But the public and even the critics found it difficult to discern the quiet melody of Bonnard’s painting among the deafening trumpets of the Fauves. It would be wrong to suggest that Bonnard was not influenced at all by Henri Matisse and his friends. The Parisian series he produced for Ivan Morozov in 1911 was painted in more vivid colours than A Corner of Paris. But Bonnard could never have become a follower of Matisse: his temperament and the circumstances of his artistic development, very different from those of the Fauves, precluded that.
It was not only Bonnard’s tendency to approach his subject intimately that made him reject the scarcity of artistic means to which Matisse and Picasso had come in the first decade of the twentieth century and which had brought them world-wide recognition as the trend-setters in contemporary art. Bonnard did not consider Impressionism entirely passé, yet he wrote, “When my friends and I decided to follow the Impressionists, attempting to develop their achievements, we strove to overcome their naturalistic conception of colour. Art is not copying nature. We were more mindful of composition. We felt
Th. Natanson, op. cit., p. 170
Quoted from: A. Terrasse,
Quoted from: J. Bouret,