One sure measure of the greatness of Pierre Bonnard is the fact that Pablo Picasso never missed an opportunity to pour scorn on his work. The two painters could have not been more unalike, in their lives and in their art. Picasso, to whom Hobbes’s description of human existence could be aptly adapted – nasty, brutish and short – was a relentless self-promoter, while Bonnard for his part relentlessly shrank from the public gaze.
What they had in common was that they were both innovators, Picasso more obviously so, perhaps, though it can be argued that Bonnard, in his much quieter way, was the more radical of the two. Certainly he was the greater colourist, though Picasso would probably say he was too busy doing other things to concern himself overmuch with the look of summer sunlight on a cornfield or the silvered sheen on the surface of a bathroom mirror.
Bonnard was born in 1867 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb in the south of Paris. His father was a senior civil servant, and his mother worked as a housewife. In his teenage years he studied law, but from early on he determined to be a painter. He sat the law exams, but insouciantly failed, and became, briefly, a tax collector – one can almost see Picasso’s lip curling.
He enrolled as an art student, and he and a group of artist friends joined together and called themselves the Nabis, derived from the Jewish word for prophet. They discovered Gauguin, decorative sign painting – one of Bonnard’s first commercial works was a poster advertising champagne – and, most importantly, Japanese prints, especially the type known as ukiyo-e, “the floating world”. Indeed, Bonnard was so taken by these images of delicate landscapes with assorted geishas and kabuki dancers that he earned the nickname “Jabonnard”.
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In the Japanese masters’ ungrounded, light-as-air technique he found, as Isabelle Cahn writes, liberation from “the tyranny of form”. The influence was to endure throughout his career, and is to be detected still in the late, great baigneuse (bather) series, and the final, astonishing self-portraits.
In 1893 he spied a young woman alighting from a Paris tram, followed her to her place of work – sewing artificial pearls on to funeral wreaths – and somehow persuaded her to abandon her job, family and friends and come and live with him. She introduced herself as Marthe de Méligny, and told him she was 16; some time afterwards he discovered that her real name was Maria Boursin, and that she was 10 years older than she claimed. He did not mind. They remained together, despite some rocky patches, until Marthe’s death in 1942.
For years the couple led a peripatetic existence, moving between Paris, Normandy and the south of France. At last they settled in a modest villa in Le Cannet in the hills above Cannes. Here they lived together in mostly contented solitude, Bonnard painting constantly and Marthe constantly bathing – she seems to have spent long hours of every day in the bath, soaping herself and dreaming of who knows what.
The picture is an extraordinary work, a masterpiece of ambiguity and incipient violence that Picasso himself would hardly have risked
No idyll lasts. Bonnard, despite his diffidence, had an eye, and more than an eye, for pretty young women. One of them was Renée Monchaty, “a solar blonde beauty”, according to Cahn. She first became friends with Marthe, then posed for Bonnard, who, of course, fell in love with her. He sought to keep the affair secret, but failed. Marthe insisted that he destroy all the pictures in which Renée figured.
At least one survived, however. Young Women in the Garden was painted in the early 1920s and reworked between 1945 and 1947, after Marthe’s death.
It seems at first glance no more than a tranquil and sunny outdoor scene. At the far left Bonnard can be glimpsed, next to a man and woman, presumably lunch guests. Marthe and a servant are setting out fruit on a table. Then one’s eye is suddenly drawn to the extreme right-hand side of the canvas, where a blonde maenad is dashing forward, clutching something in her lifted hand – a tennis racquet? an axe? – seemingly intent on assaulting, perhaps even killing, Marthe.
However, it was not the wife who died, but the lover. Determined to vanquish her rival, Marthe insisted that Bonnard and she must marry, which they did, at last, in August 1925. Less than a month later, Renée took her own life.
The picture is an extraordinary work, a masterpiece of ambiguity and incipient violence that Picasso himself would hardly have risked but which mild-mannered Bonnard presents to us as if the scene shown were nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps it is not, given the heart’s extremes.
Bonnard is a sumptuous volume, beautifully produced, with scores of captivating reproductions. Isabelle Cahn’s text is informative and shrewd, and particularly illuminating on Bonnard’s artistic aims and achievements.
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