rEs nhINU2M H`M
Two Views of Bonnard
Pleasure and Repose
[House great Bonnard exhibition at Burlington 1. House has already established itself, and rightly so, as the most pleasurable event for many seasons. There are 355 items, covering the working life span from 1888 to 1947, assembled with exemplary thoughtfulness and care by Mr. Denys Sutton whose catalogue preface, notes and chronology are models, also, of penetration and instruction. Here surely at last, one feels, is an art that everyone will instinctively enjoy : a warm, sensual and radiant sensibility, invincibly Gallic, which celebrates the simple occasions of everyday life. Everything is clearly recognisable and identifiable: the street scenes; the breakfast tables; the windows opening on to radiant gardens in full, burgeoning verdure; a woman bathing; the family at tea on a terrace; the self- portrait that is mildly, if incisively, questioning, but quite free of torment—or even sharp doubt.
Bonnard's art is one of unquestioning accept- ance. I do not mean that it is complacent or uninventive: his sense of pattern, of ornamenta- tion, and his richly expressive handling of pig- ment are all personal and full of surprises. The colour is so brilliant and sonorous that it frequently sounds its own note of abstract elo- quence. His drawing is equally fresh, idiosyn- cratic and—in many instances—unexpectedly cryptic in the sparse registration of black marks and areas of tone in a white space. And yet the vision itself, to which all this is subordinate, is disconcertingly matter-of-fact : without visual shocks, apart from the splendour of that singing colour.
Like Degas, Bonnard was influenced by flat patterning and the directly abstract spacing of Japanese prints. Unlike Degas, he was also greatly affected by the swooning languor, the heavy yet inert curves, of Art Nouveau (which also touched Gauguin, though marginally). Degas's women are totally physical, at once idealised and prosaic in their presence; but trapped, as it were, in a range of postures which are never strained or theatrical and yet say something about their structure and their psy- chology which we had not seen depicted before with such clarity and analytical power. Degas told us something new about women. His work has almost the detachment, the objectivity, of a great surgeon's anatomy lesson—despite the re- assuring nature of its domestic context.
Gauguin, as we can see from the fine assembly at the Tate Gallery's exhibition of the Pont Aven artists, did not share Degas's particular probity, but, on the other hand, he did not succumb to the rhythmic patterning and gently undulating compositional devices of the Japanese print and the newly-evolved Art Nouveau style. Gauguin made a nobler, more concentrated and monu- mental, figurative art which at once pushed beyond the formal character of his time and reached back to the solemnity and austerity of Piero. It was left to Bonnard to remain content with the new-found affection for intimate sub- ject-matter, the charms of Japanese spatial arrangements, the revolutionary liberation of colour, and the saturation point of elaborate flat 'patterning. But how perfectly he describes his chosen world, and how effortlessly he attains his selected goal. Ease, Persian repose, a con- tinual hymn of loving praise to women and the fruits and flowers and good things of this earth.
A missing ingredient that might have made his work more emphatic, more frankly sexual, pos- sibly, is any sense of masculine participation. There is one painting of a woman in a bath-tub in which the dressing-gowned legs and feet of a man appear; it is a shock and it brings an alien element into Bonnard's vision. Otherwise, his gaze on women has almost the amiably uncon- cerned regard of a housekeeper, familiar with the household, and on informal terms with the mistress. Think of Cezanne's eroticism, whet! male figures were allowed to animate the female scene; or consider the strange means by which Matisse made his women, even in isolation, superbly erotic by the presence of his unseen male gaze on them and their expectant stare back.
As it is, Bonnard brought to a close the happy tradition in French painting which flowed through Fragonard, Watteau and Renoir. Some set-pieces of figures in rather contrived land- scapes, in which the disporting humans are framed by carefully placed trees, seem weak and if not academic then almost like mannered tapestry designs. But he arrived finally at a mag- nificent, pulsating conclusion : the end of the `acceptance world,' when domestic life was still not undermined—less from the tough insights of Degas than the shadows of doubt cast by the discoveries of Freud and his colleagues, and our own self-mistrust. How lovely were those innocent, optimistic, sunlit breakfast tables and flickering, funny, affectionately regarded cats. Family life still has its invincible pleasures; but a serene life like Bonnard's, meandering placidly through the years, has become very hard to achieve. The ordinariness of leisure has become a luxury. In relating what was intrinsically ordinary to a highly personal sense of uncommon luxury, Bonnard made something new and was perhaps a minor prophet as well as a glowing reminder of the old order of things. For he regis- tered a unique formal statement by making a controlled virtue out of that slackening in the tension of forms which had become a fin de siecle vice: seeping in from affluence and surfeit.
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Previous page
