Page 17 - Studio International - February 1966

been toward producing a more and more clearly- his material from some other quarter. I don't think it's
articulated, thoroughly-structured and consciously- quite enough just to say that he is interested in bringing
organised picture. peripheral vision into the picture. I don't think it's quite
What one finds in the later 19th-century in France is a enough to say that, because no painter can do anything
constant search for kinds of vision, kinds of impression, directly with peripheral vision. The question is, What is
which are not clearly focal: a search to capture the the medium, the scheme of structure, on to which he
ambiguous and elusive. Perhaps the importance that hangs the effects of peripheral vision ? It seems that this
Bonnard himself attaches to the first flush of his really comes somehow from outside Western painting.
encounter with his subject—to the seducing first impres- I think it was perhaps to do with a kind of oriental sense
sion, which he's very anxious to retain—is that he of patterning.
wants his picture to keep the feeling of something Sylvester I don't know about an oriental sense of
caught in peripheral vision. Now this would tie in with patterning. Maybe that's there, but I think too there
what Forge said about Bonnard dissolving the dis- may be an Eastern kind of thinking in one respect.
tinction between foreground and background, and I You were talking about a kind of interchangeability
Two Bonnards 'missing' from the think this is just what links him to the development between things in different parts of the space. The
Royal Academy exhibition
and exploration of 19th-century French paintings, in Eastern Church has a concept of trans-substantiation
Opposite terms of both subject matter and technique. which is different from that of the Western Church. As
La glace haute c. 1914
Forge I do see this, but if you think of the vagueness you know, the Western doctrine is that at the moment of
49 x 32 1/2 in.
Signed of Monet or Renoir, the vaguer it is, the more intensely the consecration of the host, the substance of the host
you try to relate it to something which will make it is transformed from bread into the body of Christ. This
Below
Ma maison a Vernon precise, not vague. What you try to key Monet's mist substantial change occurs at a certain moment. Now,
(Le jardin inculte)
19 1/4 x 33 3/4 in. into is the look of mist. You make sense of the aesthetic according to the doctrine of the Eastern Church, there
Signed organisation of the picture by relating it to the look of is a kind of change going on all the time, the host is
Westminster seen through the mist, and this gives it a both bread and the body of Christ: it is never at any
kind of hard, regulated quality which brings it back to moment one to the exclusion of the other. What we
certain expectations. With Bonnard, the question is, have here is thinking in terms of process rather than in
What is the element of expectation, and where does the terms of things. What is above all oriental in Bonnard is
known lie ? perhaps this : he is concerned with the process of seeing
It's clear that he is not using the material of observa- rather than the look of things.
tion in the way that Monet is. He's somehow drawing Monet's mist is the look of a mist, but Bonnard is some-

La petite blanchisseuse 1896
Lithograph in five colours
7 1/2x 11 3/4 in.
A plate for Album des Peintres-
Graveurs (1)
Lent by the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris