Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch

motifs. Of course, this practice never amounted to mere repetition. His way towards revealing the beauty inherent in any object lay primarily through the rich expressive resources of colour, making a metaphorical link with what is precious. Bonnard believed that “a picture is a patchwork of colours which when combined with each other, in the final analysis form an object in such a way as to allow the eye to glide freely over it without encountering obstacles”.[24] Bonnard delighted in walking the tightrope between stylised decorative abstraction and unstylised realism. His Landscape with a Goods Train (Train and Fishing Boats) provides a typical example. Each detail of the landscape may puzzle the viewer. It takes time to identify the tree in the right lower corner for what it is or the vineyard on the left. All details are governed by the ensemble of tones. That is why Bonnard is inevitably vague. It is as if he was reproducing the impression of a person walking down a path or, perhaps, looking at the scene from a moving train. For instance, it takes time to make out the fascinating figure of a little girl. This “sketchy” manner of painting is very characteristic of Bonnard. He tends to avoid a close scrutiny of his characters. Looking at the Landscape with a Goods Train, the viewer finds himself drawn into a system of resemblances. In pictorial terms, as well as by some inner meaning, the head of the little girl, the clump of trees, the puffs of smoke coming from the engine and the tugs, and the clouds are linked in a common chain. For all the relative nature of brushstrokes or, perhaps, because of it, the viewer is made to feel himself inside the picture, as in the Mirror in the Dressing-Room. For this reason too, the foreground is more blurred than the rest of the picture. Here, in a panoramic landscape, Bonnard retains the intimacy typical of his work. The Landscape with a Goods Train and Early Spring. Little Fauns address the viewer in the artist’s usual quiet tones. They are imbued with his unique brand of lyricism and winning archness. With an ease typical of him, Bonnard introduces a group of fauns into his landscape, figures which could never have appeared in the canvases of the Impressionists. The puffed out cheeks of the faun playing the pipe is a delight. One does not immediately notice these little goat-legged creatures at the edge of the painting, but once one does, one cannot banish them from this convincingly real corner of the Ile-de-France. And this unpretentious yet endearing landscape seems alive with the gentle silvery sounds of the pipe. By introducing fauns into his landscape, Bonnard endowed it with metaphorical overtones. A friend of the Symbolists, he used their poetical methods, at the same time gently mocking them. It is hard to decide what is more important in this picture, the humour or the joy at nature reawakening. It is this unity of poetic joy and gentle irony that makes the landscape of the countryside around Paris at the same time an embodiment of the mythical Golden Age.

      Pierre Bonnard, Nude Against the Light, 1908. Oil on canvas, 124.5 × 108 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.

      Pierre Bonnard, Young Woman Seated on a Chaise longue, c. 1904. 53 × 60 cm, Location unknown.

      Gustave Caillebotte, A Paris Street in the Rain, 1877. Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago.

      Pierre Bonnard, The People’s Square in Rome, 1921. Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 96.5 cm, The Phillips collection, Washington.

      The nature of Bonnard’s relationship with Impressionism, a key factor in his art, reveals itself most vividly in the subjects he chose and in his compositions. The Parisian townscapes may serve as an illustration. In comparison with his early pictures of Paris, the urban scenes executed in 1911–12, representing one of the peaks in Bonnard’s art, are remarkable for their more complex composition. They contain more human figures, more space and more light, and they are richer in colouring. These features place them close to the works of Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. An Impressionistic flavour is strongly felt in his city scenes Morning in Paris and Evening in Paris, a pair of works painted for Ivan Morozov and seemingly bearing all the marks of a casually observed scene. In fact, of course, this was not the case. Both pictures were painted from memory, as was Bonnard’s usual practice. In these two townscapes Bonnard was particularly attentive to composition and in this respect, as before, he demonstrated a closer affinity to Degas rather than to Monet and Pissarro. Indeed in his very conception of street scenes Bonnard also followed Degas, or perhaps even Caillebotte, while Monet and Pissarro, the founding fathers of the Impressionistic townscape, were absorbed with a desire to show street life with its unceasing movement from a distance and avoided close-up or even middle-ground views of pedestrians. Yet unlike Degas (Place de la Concorde, 1873, Hermitage) and still less like Caillebotte (A Paris Street in the Rain, 1877, Art Institute of Chicago) Bonnard does not focus on the human figures and avoids depicting them in detail. The soft, subdued patches of colour affect the viewer before he has become aware of what this or that patch actually represents. Bonnard’s wonderfully orchestrated colour arrangements are not arbitrary. In Morning in Paris, the blue and pink tones of the sky and the cool hues of the foreground are so true to life that they alone, even without the scurrying pedestrians and the coal-merchant’s cart with its early-morning load, clearly indicate the time of the day. But even after we realise the significance of the colour, that does not reduce its charm; quite the contrary, it is increased. The patches of colour do no more than “name” the objects depicted. They are sufficiently autonomous, and the beauty of their combinations could serve as a powerful justification for their independent existence.

      At the same time, each masterly brushstroke and each patch of colour possess a wonderfully keen and expressive force. The vagueness of Bonnard’s painting does not reduce but intensifies that expressiveness. For example, the patch of colour representing a dog in Morning in Paris shows only its body and tail, but these details are enough to reveal the animal’s behaviour with a striking liveliness and precision. In the same picture, the silhouette of the coal-merchant’s donkey heavily and hurriedly moving its slipping legs may serve as another example. There is no animal painter of modern times who understood the character of animals better than Bonnard. With the alert eye of a master, Bonnard also catches a person’s way of walking or behaving. The old flower-seller in Evening in Paris moves in a manner typical of her alone, unhurriedly measuring each step. The children fooling about a bit in the street move as only children can.

      The details of the picture are so arranged as to give an impression of the Parisian way of life. In Morning in Paris in the foreground the artist depicts people who have to rise early – the old coal merchant, a group of young girls hurrying to work, a little boy loitering on his way to school. In Evening in Paris the movement of the figures is quite different. Here people are out for a stroll. In the first picture, Bonnard depicts a square, a junction of different streams of movement; in the second, a boulevard. In the first case, the artist needs an open space; in the second, a closed space. In the morning scene it is important to show the sunrise colours of the sky and the walls of houses catching the first rays of the sun; for the scene at dusk other details are necessary. “What is beautiful in nature”, said Bonnard, “is not always beautiful in painting, especially in reduction. One example is the effects of evening and night.”[25] They say that Félix Fénéon, the manager of the Bernheim Gallery, once casually remarked to Bonnard that his Parisian street scenes were a Success, after which the artist stopped painting them.[26] This may have taken place in 1912, when the series of works commissioned by Morozov was on display for the first time at the gallery. Bonnard was always mistrustful of success; to his mind, it made an artist repeat himself. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bonnard’s last picture of this kind, Place Clichy, is dated 1912 (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon). It is a large painting which appears to be a sort of synthesis of the motifs in the Moscow works. The liveliness, the unassuming simplicity of the subject, an apparently casual composition which, however, always has a “framework” (Bonnard’s word) and is well balanced, the mobility of texture, with each brushstroke vibrating in every patch of colour – all these elements are characteristic of an easel painting. It would seem from this that Bonnard had no special talent for monumental art, yet his large decorative

24

A. Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, 1967, p. 11

25

A. Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard,Paris, 1967

26

A. Vaillant, Bonnard, London, 1966, p. 113