In the End.

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)
Self Portrait, ca. 1938–40
Oil on canvas; 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1972
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
www.metmuseum.org

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 27 – April 19 2009

Pierre Bonnard’s interior paintings from the last twenty years of his life are so lusciously radiant it is easy to get caught up in the color and miss what is insubstantial, and more important. Like Monet, whose late works leaned toward belligerent, linear insanity due to his failing eyesight, and Louis Wain whose illustrations of cats turned into sinister, kaleidoscopic patterns as he succumbed to schizophrenia; Bonnard’s late in life works feel more like a charged descent from his more famous earlier works. This collection represents distortion at the hands of depression and loss, not ingenuity through bright palate.

Much like the work of Matisse, who was painting in a similar style during this same period in history, Bonnard’s paintings from this late period are more about patterns than subjects. The difference between someone like Bonnard and someone like Matisse, however, is that while Matisse focused decidedly on using his abstraction definitively, with distinct, bold colors, heavy outlines and a concentrated simplicity; Bonnard is comparatively messy, hazy and indecisive. It is the repetitive actions of his messy lines and bold colors that force his subjects into an oblivion of abstraction. In The White Interior, for example, the bent figure (assumably Bonnard’s wife Marthe) is nearly indistinguishable from the floor; the salmon-navy speckles of the rug synonymous with her clothing. The table, doors and windows jut out in blinding, but muddled white competing in intensity with the dark blotches of plant life outside and in, while the lighter outlines of the dishware on the table barely resist a dappled unity with the tablecloth. The effect is aggressive, but so universally aggressive that no one element separates itself from the whole; there are no centers of interest, just one big mess of equally active lines and colors competing with each other in a way that is visually stimulating and mentally exhausting.

Despite the pervasiveness of subjects such as bowls of fruit and food, books, papers, furniture and plant life, Bonnard’s people are the most interesting. In Flowers on the Mantelpiece at Le Cannet a woman stands with her back to us, hand on the mantelpiece dissected by the edge of the canvas. Her face, turned only slightly inward, as if resisting a glace over her shoulder, suggests her tense awareness of the viewer’s eyes on her. In Before Dinner, two female figures stand to the back and the side of the canvas, looking dartingly downward and away, also aware of a viewer whose eyes they shamefully refuse to meet. Each figure is pushed into the background behind huge tables of food, overly detailed bouquets of flowers and immense windows. They hover, alienated from themselves and each other, around the edges of the interiors of their lives; conceding their significance to the inanimate objects that represent them.

Finally, and most tellingly, are Bonnard’s paintings of himself from the very final years of his life. Each of the medium sized paintings features Bonnard cropped just below the shoulders, staring back at the viewer. His sunken features and upturned eyebrows punctuated by the mottled, dysfunctional mess of his hands. He is a pathetic creature. These paintings lack the color variation so predominant in the rest of the show, mainly comprised of fleshy tones in pasty pink and sallow yellow. Bonnard’s pained face fades into the color of the background as though he is disintegrating before the viewer’s eyes. In the context of these paintings this show seems less about Bonnard’s last move toward sumptuous, overwhelming abstraction than it is about his feelings as a man at the end of his life. His beloved wife gone, his resources waning, his health failing, he painted his life as he saw it—as a unity of ordinary things estranged from, and blurring into themselves and then, into non-existence. The work is hard on the senses for its assertive abstraction and movements toward immateriality, but keep your eyes on the canvas and you’ll see Bonnard’s ability to immortalize his own decline in a way that stands outside of time.