He was dismissed as a 'painter of happiness', but Pierre Bonnard's vivid, sensual works mask a deeper melancholy, writes Lara Marlowe
Was Pierre Bonnard a late-blooming post-Impressionist who wandered through the first half of the 20th century ignoring the revolutions of fauvism, cubism, surrealism and abstraction? Or was Bonnard (1867-1947) "a great classic of the 20th century", as Suzanne Pagé says? Pagé is the curator of the first major retrospective of Bonnard's work in Paris in 22 years, at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris. Her critics claim Bonnard was a conventional, money-making choice after the museum's two-year closure. Does it matter? With the support of LVMH/Moet Hennessy, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, Pagé has produced an unprecedented opportunity to view 90 masterpieces, on loan from dozens of Russian, American, European and French museums.
The quarrel over Bonnard's modernity - or lack thereof - started during his lifetime. "Bonnard is the best of all of us," his friend Matisse said. But Picasso dismissed Bonnard as "not really a modern painter" and called him "a pot-pourri of indecision". What, one wonders, could be more modern than indecision? Bonnard's paintings are definitely crowd-pleasers: lush gardens, sun-flooded rooms, women meditating in bath-tubs, children dancing and small dogs frolicking, all in brilliant colours. Yet Pagé rejects the widespread perception that Bonnard is le peintre du bonheur (the painter of happiness).
"I find a great deal of melancholy in these paintings," she says. "Bonnard blurred lines. He worked in uncertainty." Like the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Bonnard wanted "to suggest things, rather than name them". Though he was not a theoretician, Bonnard's pronouncements on art hint at what he tried to achieve. "A painting is a little world which must be sufficient unto itself," he said. His canvases are flat and decorative, his themes limited to the beauty of nature and the intimate world of women. "The principal subject," Bonnard wrote, "is the surface, which has its colour, its laws - beyond objects."
The son of a French civil servant, Bonnard studied law before breaking away to become a painter. "I'd been interested in drawing and painting for a long time, but it wasn't an irresistible passion," he wrote. "I wanted at any cost to escape from a monotone life." In 1893, Bonnard met Marthe, the muse who would have a decisive influence on his life. The daughter of a provincial carpenter and a mid-wife, her real name was Maria Boursin. On coming to Paris in 1892, she changed it to the more aristocratic Marthe de Méligny and found work doing arrangements in an artificial flower factory.
For 49 years, until her death in 1942, Marthe was Bonnard's principal model. The early paintings are suffused with the young painter's discovery of sensuality: Marthe putting on black stockings; pulling her night-gown off over her head; lying naked on sofa and bed, her legs spread invitingly apart. Already, there is something aquatic in the way the bedclothes swirl around her. In L'Homme et la Femme (1900) Bonnard captures the alienation that he and his mistress feel after making love. Two kittens have jumped back onto the bed that was just occupied by the lovers. Marthe seems to stare at her foot while Bonnard stands naked on the other side of a folding screen, elongated like an El Greco.
Art historians are not certain whether Marthe suffered from asthma, tuberculosis or merely hypochondria, but she bathed several times a day and the childless couple travelled often to spas, mountains and the countryside, for her health. Marthe's ablutions provided Bonnard with his best-known theme. In Cabinet de Toilette au Canapé Rose (1908), we see her standing nude, in black slippers, her back arched and chest thrown forward, spraying herself with perfume. A mirror - one of Bonnard's favourite devices - hangs over the wash basin. As the years pass, eroticism ebbs from Bonnard's paintings of Marthe, though her body remains young. By the time we see her in Baignoire (1925), the tub looks like a sarcophagus; her flesh has the greyish tones of a cadaver.
Bonnard met Renée Monchaty, who became his model and mistress. He painted more than 20 portraits of her, including La Cheminée (1916), where Renée stands naked before a fireplace mirror, one hand raised behind her head. A horizontal nude painting by Bonnard's friend Maurice Denis is reflected behind Renée, whose back is in turn reflected in a smaller mirror. The brown hair in the lower right corner of the mirror is believed to be Marthe's head.
In 1925, the same year that Bonnard finally married Marthe, Renée committed suicide. Bonnard was devastated by Renée's death, and kept paintings of her with him for the rest of his life. Whatever sadness Bonnard felt, it showed only in his introspective self-portraits. There are hints of melancholy in his sunny paintings: the woman who bathes, lies in a chaise longue in the sun or sits with a pet dog or cat before a table laden with fruit never smiles. In rare group scenes such as Le Café au Petit Poucet, Place Clichy, Le Soir, individuals appear solitary.
But Bonnard's paintings are about light and colour, not emotion. "The one who sings is not always happy," he said. He and Marthe spent winters on the Côte d'Azur, summers in Normandy. Many times, Bonnard painted the countryside through an open door or window. In Salle à manger à la campagne (1913), the hot oranges and pinks of the interior contrast with the cold blues and greens of the tablecloth, door, foliage and sky outside.
"Colour swept me up, and almost unconsciously, I sacrificed form to colour," Bonnard said. Matisse also painted windows and the land or sea beyond them. But in Matisse's paintings, interior and exterior form a continuous pattern. Bonnard clearly delineates the two, and makes one long for a house in the country. When he returned to Paris after the second World War, Bonnard was invited to the Louvre one evening. Thrilled by the view of the quais and the Seine, he pulled a young curator aside to tell him: "The most beautiful things in museums are the windows."
Pierre Bonnard: L'oeuvre d'art, un arrêt du temps is at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 11 ave du Président Wilson, Paris 16e, until May 7
Hazardous work: restoring the art museum
The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris re-opened on February 2nd after two years of work to bring the art deco building up to 21st century safety standards.
The greatest challenge was removing asbestos from the back of the 250 wood panels which comprise Raoul Dufy's La Fée Électricité (The Electricity Fairy). At 60m wide and 10m high, it is the world's largest painting. When Dufy painted it as a backdrop for the Palace of Light pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair, asbestos coating was the ultimate in modern fire protection; much later, the tiny fibres were found to be carcinogenic.
An entire wing of the museum was enclosed in a plastic bubble. Workers wore protective masks and clothing similar to those used in the nuclear industry. As they scraped the asbestos off the back of the panels, the fibres were vacuumed into special filters.
After each two-and-a-half hour scraping session, workers had to take three showers in successive sealed rooms. In the first shower they wore protective clothing, which was destroyed after each session. By the third shower, they were naked. This painstaking process cost €800,000, making The Electricity Fairy the world's most expensive restoration.