(3 of 3)
The rumpled emptiness of the rest of the bed in Indolence declares that "Bonnard was here," but in the future Bonnard's presence in his own work would be elusive. You can see his hands sticking into the foreground of Large Yellow Nude, holding something unidentifiable--perhaps a crumpled sheet of paper. He appears reflected in mirrors across the room a few times. There are some anxious-looking self-portraits, the artist seeing himself in the bathroom in the morning, scrawny and sad; they are as piercing as the best of Giacometti. The most mysterious of them is Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror, finished in 1946, the year before his death: a mild, bald creature of completely indeterminable age, who might be a shorn 30-year-old human or a space alien. What he is thinking, one cannot even begin to guess.