We are looking into a sort of sea cave, shining with internal color. Its walls are covered with a wobbly grid of large tiles: yellow, viridian, mauve-flecked with rose madder. The floor is all sea-green and turquoise speckles, but it's hard to say exactly what color any patch of the gelatinous mosaic is because each is so modified by contrasting touches within its small boundaries. The biggest shape in this aquarium light rises diagonally across the picture: a bath, like an immense open oyster, in which floats the body of a woman, all legs, shining indistinctly in the water. She seems in a trance--her face can't be read as a face but more as a spongy clump of jeweled paint. She is as indifferent as coral, not posing but tenderly spied on.
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.
The 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. He doesn't have the commanding presence in modern art history that Picasso or Matisse has, though in some ways he was as great a painter. Each generation has to discover him for itself, and each time he's a surprise.
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."
Bonnard began his career as a member of a young dissident group called the Nabis, or Prophets, that had formed in 1889 in Paris. They believed in taking art down to its essential flat patches of color, strong boundaries, tapestry-like abutments of form and a general emphasis on the decorative. Their prototypes came from Japanese prints and the influence of Paul Gauguin. And they had close ties to Symbolism. Their literary god was the poet Stephane Mallarme, who had conceived of poetry as a structure of words and absences: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence." This was very close to the effect of Bonnard's still lifes and interiors, with their incessant qualification of color within color; their exquisite play of large, vague shapes and smaller, intensely worked ones; and their sense of the instability of perception.