Artistic reputation is odd. There’s a shadowy background market in genius with its own fluctuations and rhythms. Who buys, who sells? There are the unmoving blue chips – Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Matisse, and many more – and then the hot tips who drift down, from Graham Sutherland and Dalí to Murillo and John Bratby.
It is all strange, driven by obscure shifts in public sensibility and the hungry manoeuvres of the art market. Yet we can’t get away from reputation – and the case of Pierre Bonnard is an interesting one. He has always been highly regarded, and yet never, quite, in the top league. There he sits in his alluring sunlit apartment, with its violet and cobalt shadows and excellent plumbing, but firmly on a floor below the great world-famous terraces of Picasso and Matisse.
But Bonnard is having a moment. Last year we had “Bonnard’s Worlds” at the Phillips Collection in Washington and “Bonnard in Japan” in Aix. This spring, “Bonnard and the Nordic Countries” will be at the National Museum in Stockholm. British art lovers were treated to the huge, sensational “Colour of Memory” Bonnard show at Tate Modern in 2019.
Publications come second only to the exhibitions, and we now have a truly gargantuan monograph by Isabelle Cahn of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a book so rich in colour and analysis it’s worth the team of stevedores needed to open and hold it for you.
It is hard to go through this book, or to walk the big Bonnard shows, without acknowledging one of the modern world’s truly great artists, a man who at least nudges and challenges his infinitely more famous friend and rival Henri Matisse. Popular though he’s always been, that mysterious market has Bonnard wrong; he is even bigger, even better.
This may be about marketing. Picasso was the great self-seller, with his famous politics, famous dress sense, famous love life, the turbulent magus of the 20th century. Matisse, with his doves, his scissors and his pithy wisdom, wasn’t far behind.
How could poor Bonnard compete, this cadaverous, bespectacled, formally dressed French bourgeois, who shunned publicity and lived most of his life in relative seclusion with his wife and muse, Marthe? Cahn calls him “the enigmatic Monsieur Bonnard” and writes: “Refusing to create a public persona to pass on to posterity, he fled the limelight, preferring to work in the peace of his studio. Nor was he ever prone to theorising.” The photographs of him show, she adds, an “aloof man with an impassive face, seemingly at odds with the modernism” of his work.
Add to all this his curious, distinctive brushwork, hazy or custardy, very far from the decisive panache of his rivals, and the barriers to proper understanding become clearer. Picasso notoriously described Bonnard’s work as “a potpourri of indecision”. The latter’s colourism, more intense and extreme than that of any other modern painter, makes it easy to view him as a visual voluptuary with nothing more to express than the pleasures of being alive.
He does express those – through landscape, still life and the famous Marthe-in-the-bath nudes – but he is a far greater painter than his conventional subject matter suggests.
Although his paintings can indeed be luscious, Bonnard was not a self-indulgent man. A friend wrote of him that he “abhors luxury, I mean material luxury, to the extent of dreading comfort. He is never happier than in a cramped room or between bare walls.” What, therefore, are all those tables piled high with fruit, those gloriously unkempt gardens beyond the opened windows, supposed to be saying to us?
Bonnard was a man of serious intellect, politically and artistically connected to his times. Almost shockingly, he did not normally paint in front of the subject. He complained that the presence of a motif was bothersome: “With the departure point of a picture being an idea – if the object is there while one is working – there always is the danger for the artist of getting caught up in the incidences of direct, immediate vision, and, in doing so, losing the original idea.”
It is hard to believe that he turned his back, with his canvases nailed to a wall, on the naked figures, blossoming bushes, sunlit tablecloths, cats, dogs and bathroom scenes of his mature work. But it was so.
Diving ever deeper into the mysteries of extreme colour combination, to the point of hallucination, and complex rhythmic structures, Bonnard was painting nothing less than time and the human condition, with just as much seriousness as, for instance, Kandinsky.
He creates, as Cahn notes, plunging viewpoints, visual ambiguities and distortions to disrupt the viewer. He is, she argues, an equivalent of Marcel Proust, who wrote: “Style is… a revelation of a private universe which each one of us sees and which is not seen by others. The pleasure an artist gives us is to make us aware of an additional universe.”
That’s it. Like a great novel, great art breaks open an inner world. Bonnard gives us, as only the very greatest artists can, an “additional universe”, changing the world we saw before and deepening our understanding of ourselves. If we are truly living through a revival of his reputation, then we are lucky people indeed.
Pierre Bonnard
Isabelle Cahn
Prestel, 416pp, £99
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[See also: Why painting (still) matters]
This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors