Page 16 - Studio International - February 1966

A kind of informality

David Sylvester, Michael Podro and Andrew Forge talking about Bonnard

*At Burlington House Sylvester all is, but not seeing Bonnard's greatness, because to
The Royal Academy exhibition * is the
until March 13
biggest Bonnard exhibition ever. There are 250-odd see that you have to stay with an individual painting for
paintings in oils and about 100 graphic works. Although rather a long time. Maybe one could almost do Bonnard
a lot of very important Bonnards are missing, I think it a greater service by exhibiting 30 or 40 of his best
would be difficult to remember an exhibition of a 20th- paintings.
century artist in which there were more great paintings. With some artists, like Rembrandt and Cézanne, as
Yet I feel, ungratefully, that with an exhibition of this soon as you come up against a picture you realise at
sort, because there are so many marvellous things to once that this is painting at the very highest level ; there
look at, and also so many rather ordinary ones, it are others, like Chardin and Corot, and perhaps even
becomes too tempting not to stay with any single Velasquez, with whom you have to be looking at a
painting. I suspect that visitors might have a tendency painting for some time before you know that this is a
to go from picture to picture thinking how beautiful it masterpiece of a very high order.
Podro This perhaps accounts for a very odd effect that I
think the exhibition may have. One comes in, and
suddenly Bonnard seems utterly different to the Bon-
nard one had been used to when one saw individual
pictures hung among pictures by Monet, Renoir and
Cézanne. Suddenly it seems as though he'd shown that
all the others had been relatively formal and straight-
laced inside their particular kind of painting.
In fact he does achieve a kind of informality beyond
anything achieved before, but one separates him from
Impressionists-and Cézanne-perhaps too strongly
when you see a lot of Bonnards together because one is
seduced by one painting after another, not giving each
particular picture the kind of sustained attention which
you give single pictures placed next to Cézanne and
Monet.
Forge But don't you think that he is very different from
his 19th-century predecessors ? Obviously his subject
matter comes straight out of Impressionism; obviously
the tonality of his painting, the kind of tonal language,
even to some extent his way of drawing, comes out of
the whole body of Impressionism. But one of the things
that really strikes me is that he is very different from
them because he is much further removed from the
central tradition deriving from the Renaissance of
Western painting. Perhaps he is a more oriental artist,
perhaps as did art nouveau he is really producing a
different kind of decorative drawing from anything that
had proceeded it, so his sense of composition seems
quite different-even the actual syntax of his painting,
the way in which he represents things, seems quite
different. I don't believe his drawing is founded on the
figure in the way that, say, the drawing of Cézanne or
Matisse is founded.
The kind of rhythms he draws naturally don't derive
from the rhythms of the human figure or for that matter
from the rhythms of discreet foreground objects ; rather
they drive from a way of visualising the background as
being completely of a piece with the foreground, he is
never really pressing the distinction between fore-
ground and background in a way taken absolutely for
granted by his predecessors.
Podro I don't quite take the point. It seems to me that
Bonnard is carrying on with a process set in train in
19th-century French painting, as in fact Forge said, a
process which was first of all a matter of seeking out
relatively informal subjects-and you get this right the
way back in the late graphic work of Géricault-and then
the seeking out effects of half-focussed vision. During
the Renaissance the whole development of art had