Page 19 - Studio International - February 1966

sense of seeing the world as though one were not recapitulates the process of vision. And to some extent
navigating by horizons and by one's own vertical. the ambiguities of vision also help us to order things,
It doesn't seem to me to be a figure-based sense of not only make things more confused. The fact that you
composition at all, but to have that curious kind of see a series of discrete figures as part of one continuous
swimming quality that vision perhaps has when you're form helps us to grasp them, as well as in a sense being
tight and you can't focus too well. It seems to be quite an ambiguity. The Renaissance artist, in producing a
different from a sense of seeing in which you are aware clarified, focussed image, also to some extent recapitu-
of standing in one point and focussing on one point. lated our ordering processes of vision.
Podro I very much agree with this. Perhaps I should Sylvester Whereas Bonnard, so far from harnessing our
modify what I said before. The Renaissance artist is ordinary habits, finds a way to recreate in painting the
constantly at immense pains to help you focus ever disorder of reality.
more certainly by enormous redundancies of pattern and Podro With this I would agree.
repetition, and this is just the kind of thing that an Sylvester And with regard to what Forge was saying
artist like Bonnard will refuse to do. about the disappearance of focus, I was talking before
Sylvester But in that case, it's not true when you say about Klee as an artist concerned with process, and in
that the Renaissance artist recapitulates the ambiguities late Klees you get an all-overness—one which is
of vision. He does the opposite. He deals with them in possibly the basis of all-overness in recent American
order to sort them out. painting. Bonnard's kind of all-overness is very differ-
Podro He doesn't simply recapitulate ambiguity but he ent, because he's a visual painter, but I believe that
all-overness goes together with the concern with pro-
cess rather than object that's characteristic of recent
thought in many fields.
Podro But isn't it a little dangerous here? We've been
treating Bonnard as though he had been engaged in
some exquisite game of perceptual operations, when of
course his whole play with peripheral images or the
suggestive and the only half-grasped is intimately
connected with the kind of subject-matter, particularly
the erotic subject-matter, the sort of sudden flush of
recognition of a girl taking her dress off, or whatever it
happens to be. This play on the edge of attention is a
search for those characteristics which act almost as
sexual trigger mechanisms.
Forge I was just going to say that. There's something
bizarre about talking about this painter as though he
was some way-out analytical cubist, when really the
kind of weight of his art has to do with terrifically real
things. The actual things that he paints, whether you
think of it in terms of how they move or how one
becomes aware of them, or of what they are in them-
selves, are really all-important. There can be no less
abstract modern artist than Bonnard. Isn't it true that
over and over again one realises that the meaning of an
exquisite passage of paint to which one had already
responded warmly and positively for its own sake,
comes with this kind of delayed effect only when you
suddenly realise it represents a foot?
Sylvester In terms of reality, what we were talking
about before may well add up to this : when I look at a
Bonnard of a girl taking off her clothes or in the bath I
never think, as I look at it, 'This is what a girl looks like
taking off her clothes', which I might think in front of a
Degas. I think: 'This is what I feel like looking at a girl
taking off her clothes'. And it always comes back to
me, it always comes back to the perceiving subject.
Podro To put it bluntly, it works. That he manages to
select those shapes, those configurations, those vague-
nesses which are really charged emotionally. I'm a little
surprised that Forge should separate at all the beautiful
passage of paint from the subject. Can you ever look at
Bonnard without the configuration, as it were,
existing in a psychological and subject dimension as