Page 66 - Studio International - July 1966

his desperate need to keep the top spinning. He gives us neither the recessive space of and ultimately alienating attempts of Futur-
His paintings are slow compilations of inward tradition, nor the advancing or ambiguously ism and Surrealism.
glimpses translated into ceaselessly modified shifting space of modern painting : we seem Near the end of Proust's great work comes a
forms and colours. His subjects may nominally to be, rather, in a world of time. passage where Marcel Proust stands atop his
be those of Impressionism but it is an enclosed Time and memory: inevitably one thinks of act of remembrance and looks about him:
world that he paints, even when he is painting Proust who, moreover, has the additional `There came over me a feeling of profound fatigue
landscape, not the outgoing world of Monet, relevance of a writer fascinated with the at the realisation that all this long stretch of time
Renoir, and Pissarro. His colour is no more emotive and mechanical worlds of optics. not only had been uninterruptedly lived, thought,
secreted by me, that it was my life, my very self,
theirs than is his method. Where they chal- There are many passages in A la recherche du but also that I must, every minute of my life, keep
lenged art conventions with their unmodified temps perdu that one could use to illuminate it closely by me, that it upheld me, that I was
brushstrokes on luminous grounds, Bonnard Bonnard. In fact Proust's novel holds a posi- perched on its dizzying summit, that I could not
challenges habits of reading and classifying tion in literary history comparable to that of move without carrying it about me.'
with his obsessional brushing of colours into Bonnard's oeuvre in the history of modern There is the word for Bonnard's act of re-
each other. He has no interest in the Impres- painting. Both form the climax of a movement creation: 'secrete'. And there too we are
sionist's attachment to accurate tonal values; towards psychological truth and appear as made to feel the special burden of time laid on
his do not relate to a seen world. Light plays triumphs both in the fields of naturalism and those who have to reconstruct the past in
a far from normal role in his work. Many of of abstraction and thus throw in doubt the order to exist. Bonnard's secretions imply that
his pictures do not admit to a direction or a labels and the associated assumptions by the slow process of picture-building can be a
source of light at all and have light only means of which we are accustomed to hand- perfect means of holding and transmitting
through the luminosity of colour. Many ling the history of modern culture. Both aim experiences of a kind necessary in varying
others are painted contre jour, so that light at the expression of total experiences through degrees to us all yet not accessible to the
becomes something the subject has not got. apparently normal means, and in so doing intellect and rarely to be seized with words.
Similarly, space loses its role in the picture. offer an implied criticism of the convulsive His triumph is a profoundly human one. q

Dans le cabinet de toilette 1907 Bonnard in his studio, photographed
Oil on board 42 1/8 x 28 3/8 in. by André Ostier, 1941
Collection Bernheim-Jeune, Paris