(2 of 3)
Like his artistic ancestor Chardin or his fellow Nabi Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard was an Intimist. He cared nothing for heroic or historical themes. He had no public life, and his diary was filled not with reflections on art, life or politics but with pencil sketches and occasional notes on the weather. Nor did art theory, avidly debated among some of his painter friends, interest him much.
His subject was private life, its coziness and order, its covert gestures, its moments of deep-rooted habit and occasionally fragile intimacy, in which the artist is both agent and voyeur. He took this domestic introversion to an extreme--the world of work, for instance, is so thoroughly excluded from his paintings that he didn't even depict his own studio. His world was bounded by the bathroom, the breakfast room, the bedroom and the overgrown garden, its disorder of jasmine, honeysuckle and wisteria as exotically suffused with color as Fiji, though glimpsed through French windows.
There is nothing slack about the apparent softness of his interiors and still lifes, like the great Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, 1930-31. The light shifts and shimmers, and some of the objects on the table are drowned in it. Here is a jug, there a cup, there a brioche--but what is that oval yellowish object on the right of the tabletop? Forms sink against the light, and at first you hardly even see the ailing Marthe in her housecoat at the left edge of the painting, timidly holding her cup. Yet, as so often happens with Bonnard, under the ambiguous surface lies a rigorous structure. He jotted in his diary a reminder to seek "big forms, even in small formats." His still lifes, in particular, are marvels of marking and disposition, suffused with a beaming warmth that was the signature of Bonnard's memory at work.
He said he liked having all his subjects to hand. Among these, in the 1890s, were members of his family: his father (a civil servant in the Ministry of War), his maternal grandmother, his sister and her husband, their children. The main presence in his work, however, was the woman he lived with for almost 30 years before they wed in 1925, Maria Boursin, who called herself Marthe de Meligny. She appears in some 380 of his paintings, naked or clothed. His pictures don't narrate their relationship, but they do plot it as a series of presences and apparitions and hints.
At first she is very naked indeed. Even today, a century later, his image of Indolence, 1898, carries a terrific sexual charge--young Marthe sprawled on her side of the big bed, a coarse grin of satisfaction on her round face, her left foot scratching the inside of her right thigh like a cat. Sometimes she poses like an orthodox model--The Bathroom, 1908, where she seems transfigured by the wormy quivering of light and transparency that prevails in the room, is such an image. Sometimes Bonnard unobtrusively reuses the pose of a classical sculpture in rendering her body: the Medici Venus in Large Yellow Nude, 1931, or the Louvre's Hermaphrodite in Siesta, 1900. Quite often you have to look for her; she is on the margin of the painting or sunk in the background, as though half glimpsed, less immediately present to the eye than the blaze of light on a tablecloth. Intimacy, to Bonnard, also meant distance.