Word: bonnard
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...Pierre Bonnard is looking at his wife in the bath for the zillionth time. He will finish the picture in 1946, the year before his death at age 80. By then his wife Marthe, who was only two years younger than he, will have been dead for four years. But he is still imagining and painting her with the body of a 30-year-old. No wonder the bath in which she floats, or is embalmed, has reminded writers of a coffin...
...current Bonnard show at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which includes this painting and some 80 others, is a compressed version of a larger affair organized last year by art historian Sarah Whitfield at the Tate Gallery in London, and although it suffers somewhat from the absence of some paintings and omits his drawings and early poster designs altogether, the absence is tolerable. What matters is to have Bonnard in view again. He's one of those modernist masters who seem to keep slipping in and out of focus, not unlike some of the objects in his paintings...
...Bonnard's critics--including Picasso, who dismissed his art as "a potpourri of indecision"--have often made the mistake of treating Bonnard as a mere hedonist, with his beautiful color and apparent lack of conceptual underpinning. In this they have been wrong. There was nothing stupid or foolishly pleasurable about Bonnard's work. But Whitfield is right to see Bonnard as an elegiac artist: "He is not a painter of pleasure. He is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure...
...argue coherence but to go for the strongest level of feeling. He conveyed it with tremendous plastic force, making you feel the weight of forms and the tension of their relationships mainly by drawing and tonal structure. He was never a great colorist, like Matisse or Pierre Bonnard. But through metaphor, he crammed layers of meaning together to produce flashes of revelation. In the process, he reversed one of the currents of modern art. Modernism had rejected storytelling: what mattered was formal relationships. But Picasso brought it back in a disguised form, as a psychic narrative, told through metaphors, puns...
...posted to Quantico, Va., and while there was able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist pantheon) for the rest of his working life, this particular Matisse, with its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled and inspired him: "I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet the surface is right there...right up front...