I agree with you that the painter’s only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged and the stupidities begin.
—Bonnard to Matisse, 1935

In short, there is something abject and sinister about Bonnard’s late bathers… . The metamorphosis may be gorgeous, but it is also a kind of elegant pourriture, exquisite rot, canvases shimmering with the iridescence of putrefaction, glowing with the ooze of the informe. It is significant that Bonnard’s work is at its best when he kills off or mutilates his subject: Marthe dismembered or floating in deathlike passivity is the heroine of his most exciting canvases.
—Linda Nochlin, Art in America July 1998

There is decadence that excites and decadence that enervates. Bonnard’s is the second sort: edgeless, nerveless, weird, fussy. He isn’t mindless, exactly, but he withholds his mind from his transactions with painting. For thought, he substitutes maundering on autopilot. His compass is a vague tastefulness. This comforts people who dislike thinking. I submit that such people are already comfortable enough, on their own lookout, and should not be indulged.
—Peter Schjeldahl, The Village Voice, July 28, 1998

Who could have imagined that in 1998, more than half a century after the artist’s death, the paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) would still be a subject of controversy? Yet in certain influential quarters of the art world this season’s Bonnard exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art has elicited a response at once so intemperate and so bizarre that at times it went beyond controversy to become a moral indictment.[1] This may strike us as a very odd thing to happen to an artist as reclusive as Bonnard was in his life and as exclusively concentrated on the gravity of the painter’s vocation as he remained throughout all the later decades of his long career. But it would probably not have surprised Bonnard himself. Responses of this kind were precisely what he had in mind when he spoke of “the stupidities” which painting of his persuasion—so radically entrenched in the language of “the palette and colors”—was likely to inspire in critics who regard such a pictorial practice as a wicked indulgence.

What is it, then, about Bonnard’s painting that excites such a heated condemnatory response? Make no mistake: Bonnard really incites these critics to paroxysms of denunciation and ridicule. Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace professor of modern art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, went so far as to say of Bonnard’s late Bather pictures that “I am so repelled by the melting of flesh-and-blood model into the molten object of desire of the male painter that I want to plunge a knife into the delectable body-surface.” (She is speaking of Bonnard’s paintings of his beloved wife, Marthe.) Peter Schjeldahl, still in mourning over the lost illusions of the 1960s counterculture, adds to the indictment by speaking of these same paintings as “eye-candy,” “trivial,” the residue of “a masturbatory trace,” and “an art that is on its last legs as a culture-changing enterprise.” These writers clearly disapprove of Bonnard’s marriage as well as the paintings that derived from his domestic situation, and are made wildly angry by the high reputation he has achieved as a modern master—a reputation that Mr. Schjeldahl dismisses as having “one foot in the museum and the other in among glossy-magazine perfume ads.”

We are given an essential clue to the nature of this critical distemper in Mr. Schjeldahl’s reference to an art that is seen to fail in its duty as “a culture-changing enterprise.” Professor Nochlin’s version of this charge is that Bonnard’s later paintings mark “a retreat from the public world.” In other words, Bonnard’s paintings of his wife at her bath fail to meet what might be described as a politically correct, social-activist quotient in art. And if this is indeed the charge, then it must be said that it is at once correct and utterly ludicrous. These paintings most certainly are insufficiently engagé in the political sense to qualify as social-activist art. They are definitely not what we used to call “avant-garde” either. They have not been conceived to give us a nouveau frisson. Yet because both Professor Nochlin and Mr. Schjeldahl are savvy enough to know that the age of the avant-garde is long past, they are obliged to recast their indictments to conform to a roster of socio-sexual offenses more appropriate to the postmodernist culture wars than to the old arguments over “advanced” art.

Professor Nochlin thus speaks of dismemberment and mutilation—terms more aptly applied, perhaps, to a discussion of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon than to an elucidation of such masterpieces of memory and desire as The Bath (1925), The Bathroom (1932), and Nude in the Bath (1936). Mr. Schjeldahl, too, writes as if Bonnard has violated some sort of social compact in failing to depict his wife as an aging senior citizen. “He painted her at least 384 times,” Mr. Schjeldahl writes, “never with real attention to her face and invariably, even when she was 72 years old and dying, as a nubile young woman.”

Alas, it isn’t only in regard to the art of painting that such criticism may be relegated to what Bonnard called “the stupidities.” Is it really necessary to explain to grownups like Linda Nochlin and Peter Schjeldahl that when a man and a woman have lived together in a conjugal relation over a long period of time they inevitably accumulate a reservoir of erotic memory that profoundly alters the ways in which they see and experience each other’s physical presence? A gesture glimpsed in old age may evoke emotions tethered to a distant past that are far more vivid than the actualities of present experience. Couples who have lived together a long time do not meet each other as utter strangers upon awakening to the light of day. They tend to see each other through an involuntary scrim of memory, desire, familiarity, and regret. In such lives, the past lies close to the surface of all waking experience, ready at any moment to illuminate a gesture, an utterance, even a silence, with some freshly remembered simulacrum. A sudden look of delight, a cry of pain, or something as ordinary as the sound of a footstep on the stair—or the ablutions of the bath—may unexpectedly trigger feelings that, however brief in duration, wipe away the years to reveal a continuum of emotion, attachment, and association that is all the more precious for being unanticipated and unwilled. Does all this really have to be explained to writers claiming to be educated, sentient adults? Apparently it does, to judge from “the stupidities” that have been addressed to Bonnard’s Bather paintings on the occasion of the MOMA exhibition.

Something like this realm of experience was, in any case, central to Bonnard’s project as a painter in all the later decades of his life. His word for it was “poetry”—a poetry of feeling that for Bonnard was the poetry of life itself—and he was indeed its unrivaled pictorial master in the art of the modern era. This “poetry” is not to be mistaken for a romantic idyll, however. There was little about the anxiety, melancholy, and despair of conjugal experience that Bonnard did not comprehend—and make the subject of his paintings—long before he embarked upon the late Bather pictures. In the early bedroom paintings—Man and Woman in an Interior (1898) and Man and Woman (1900), among others—we are given glimpses of a world of sexual melancholy more often associated with the paintings of Edvard Munch and the drama of Henrik Ibsen, both potent influences in the circle Bonnard frequented in this period, than with the luxe, calme et volupté of the Impressionist masters. When he does come to paint a version of the latter in The Earthly Paradise (1916–20), he sets the autobiographical scene in Eden just before the fateful Fall—a fate Bonnard well understood to be his own in this central attachment of his long life.

Nor was there anything about the ravages that time inflicts on the frailty of human flesh that Bonnard did not understand and experience at first-hand. But this difficult subject was something he reserved for his own remarkable self-portraits, which are sometimes terrifying in their pitiless candor. To his obsessive depictions of the aging Marthe, however, Bonnard brought an unfailing moral delicacy that gives priority to an intensity of emotion that precludes the very possibility of the kind of pitiless candor the painter lavished on his self-portraits—a moral delicacy in which time is dissolved in favor of memory and feeling. Why this moral delicacy—and the exquisite painterly invention that is its exact pictorial correlative—should now be regarded as a personal and moral failure, if not something worse, rather than as a triumph of aesthetic sensibility, is a matter that has more to do with the vagaries of postmodern sexual politics than with the achievements of art.

Reading the criticism I have been quoting here—“decadence that enervates,” “a masturbatory trace,” “exquisite rot,” and so forth—I am reminded of the fatuous way in which Marxist critics used to write about Proust. Comparisons between Proust and Bonnard have been made many times, of course, but nowhere has the comparison done more to illuminate Bonnard’s painting than in Timothy Hyman’s new book on Bonnard, which in my judgment is by far the best thing ever written about the painter.[2] In calling our attention to what “aligns Bonnard’s vision with that of his near contemporary Marcel Proust (1871– 1922) in his vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu,” Mr. Hyman writes:

We know that the artist read A la recherche probably before 1925, and reread it after 1940. Proust’s artist-character Elstir may contain a component of Bonnard (he may be Monsieur Biche, “Mr. Bitchy,” at Madame Verdurin’s petit cénacle, or little group), but the real identity is with the narrator, “Marcel”; just as Proust writes the book of himself, so Bonnard will paint the picture of himself. Bonnard’s self, like Marcel’s, is not that fixed and continuous character of our usual social being. What he has to record is a sudden stabbing involuntary vision of things, and of his place among them. Jean Clair writes of Bonnard being “giddy in the astonishment of the relived moment.” He is a myopic spectator, moving through a “floating world,” until arrested by a sudden focus. (The transition from blur to focus is essential to his painterly language.)

And further:

Freud downgraded ecstasy, writing it off, along with daydreaming, as an aberration—as atavistic forms of mental life, and regressions to “primary process” thinking. But Bonnard’s first-person art could be seen as a sustained argument for the validity of such modes of being, often in association with Marthe. Her bathroom at “Le Bosquet” was for Bonnard what the famous “cork-lined room” was to Proust: a place of incarceration, and the alchemical chamber in which the base metal of everyday was transformed to gold.

It is in passages like these that Mr. Hyman’s Bonnard seems to give us not only a glimpse into the painter’s creative imagination but also an authentic account of our own experience of the paintings themselves. It goes far in establishing Bonnard’s greatness as a painter and the depth of feeling and thought upon which the paintings are based.

Yet the sad fact is that attacks on Bonnard are hardly a recent development, though I know of nothing in the past that quite matches the virulence of the criticisms I have mentioned here. The only thing approaching it is Picasso’s now legendary hostility to Bonnard—“That’s not painting, what he does”—and the attack on Bonnard in Cahiers d’Art in 1947, the year of the painter’s death, an attack which Picasso is believed to have inspired. This article asked the question, “Pierre Bonnard—est-il un grand peintre?” and answered with a resounding negative judgment: “It is evident that this reverence [for Bonnard] is shared only by people who know nothing about the grave difficulties of art and cling above all to what is facile and agreeable.” As I wrote in 1984 on the occasion of the Bonnard exhibition at Beaubourg in Paris: “Some version of this judgment will always, I suppose, be the view of professional avant-gardists in every generation, and it is for this reason that Bonnard has survived, at least until now, as a kind of displaced person in the art of our time.”[3]

Moreover, this attack in Cahiers d’Art was echoed, or at least paralleled, in avant-garde circles in New York at the time. Clement Greenberg, for example, wrote about Bonnard in 1947, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Bignou Gallery, and then again in 1948 when MOMA devoted its first exhibition to the artist. These were crucial years in the development of the New York School, and it was from the perspective of this American avant-garde that Greenberg made his curiously divided assessment of Bonnard’s accomplishments. For while he clearly admired Bonnard and gave his readers a close account of his painterly qualities—qualities that, as he wrote in 1947, “led Bonnard to paint more and more abstractly; the greater the attention to pigment and brushstroke the less becomes the concern with the original idea of the subject in nature”—he couldn’t quite forgive Bonnard for retaining his attachment to the object.

Here … is a way of approaching abstract painting that makes a detour around Cubism and yet arrives at the same place in the end [he wrote in 1947]. But Bonnard never abandons the object, and never will—nor does he violate it as Picasso has done, while still retaining it. He holds on to the third dimension more tenaciously. He may simplify nature but he does not reorganize it with respect to anything except color; and so the world he shows us disorients no one familiar with that of Monet or Renoir.

Greenberg understood that what Bonnard “seems to want is a big flat picture with the massiveness and weight of Tintoretto or Veronese,” and admired what he called Bonnard’s “audacity” in this respect. Yet because the artist was still found wanting by the avant-garde standards of that particular moment in American painting, the final judgment is highly equivocal.

But the intimacy of Bonnard’s art, its concentration on gentle pleasures, and the fact that it smells permanently of the fashions of 1900–14, expressing as it does the desire of the French middle classes to make history stop and stand still at 1912, and leave them undisturbed in the enjoyment of the modest but refined amenities that the Third Republic had permitted them to accumulate—all this should not mislead us into thinking that [Bonnard] lacks ambition as a painter.

When Greenberg returned to the subject in 1948, his assessment was equally equivocal:

The question why an artist who painted as consummately as Bonnard should have failed quite to attain major quality is perhaps best explained by a certain aspect of French tradition… . He experimented within the limits set for him, but did not try very hard to break through them.

All of this is on a much higher level of critical discourse than what we have been getting in response to the current Bonnard exhibition at MOMA, but it is also a reminder of the degree to which judgments of Bonnard’s achievements have been—and continue to be—hostage to whatever mix of avant-garde sentiment and radical political ideology happens to be rampant. The aesthete in Greenberg clearly responded with enthusiasm to Bonnard’s painterly qualities, yet a certain residue of Marxist sentiment— by the late 1940s, Greenberg was speaking of himself as a “disabused Marxist”~dash\combined with his vocation as a champion of the American avant-garde to render Bonnard finally unacceptable.

Outside the circles of that avant-garde, however, Bonnard became something of a hero and a model for a younger generation of painters—for Nell Blaine and Fairfield Porter and the painters upon whose work they were to exert an influence. And even in the circle of the Abstract Expressionist painters, at least one painter—Mark Rothko—found in that 1947 exhibition at the Bignou Gallery the foundation of the mode of color abstraction that became his signature style. In the current Rothko exhibition at the Whitney Museum, you can see the results of his encounter with Bonnard in 1946–47, and it would be a brave critic who pronounced Rothko a greater painter than Bonnard. For notwithstanding the “stupidities” that the current Bonnard exhibition has met with in New York, I believe that the artist’s greatness is now beyond dispute, or ought to be. Still, Bonnard’s own pessimism on this question cannot be ignored, either. “Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking,” he said. “But who looks? If people could see, and see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it’s because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.”

Notes
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• “Bonnard” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on June 17, 1998, and remains on view through October 13. A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Sarah Whitfield, with essays by Ms. Whitfield and John Elderfield, has been published by the Museum of Modern Art and is distributed by Harry N. Abrams (272 pages, $60; $29.95 paper). Go back to the text.
• Bonnard, by Timothy Hyman; Thames and Hudson, 224 pages, $14.95. Go back to the text.
• See “Bonnard in Paris” in The New Criterion (May 1984). Go back to the text.