Page 41 - Studio International - November 1972

A closed, infinitely open universe
Nude in Tub c. 1925
Pencil, 7 3/4 X 6 1/2 in.
Dore Ashton
Shortly before his death Bonnard was (at the beginning its point is hard, clear,
photographed by Cartier-Bresson in his studio. exigeant of definition, and later it softens in
We see the myopic, squinting head which response to the artist's fervour). These homely
Bonnard characterized in many self-portraits companions of an artist's lifetime meant much
as almost oriental; his neat slender frame to Bonnard, and serve to perpetuate certain
unchanged, a scarf around his neck, and, in the myths about him: his `intimism' and his good
sagging pocket of his knitted sweater, a small bourgeois steadiness. All those photographs
sketch book. For some sixty years Bonnard of him in his various bourgeois interiors,
was never without a pocket-sized sketch book. showing his tidy head and lean body, his
It was his means of keeping in touch with his un-bohemian attitudes and his indifference to
first vision which, as he always said, was the the flowered wallpaper, help too. But Bonnard,
most important. far from being the bon bourgeois with all the
And the pencil: at once the most demanding unfreedom that implies, was a free man. A
and most yielding tool. Any artist born before very free man. As an artist he experienced
the turn of the century cherished his pencil again and again that joyous lurch into a domain
where anything was possible. How many
artists can claim the same freedom ?
The 114 drawings — mostly small and
mostly in pencil — in the Gerard-Ayrton
Collection (exhibited at Finch College through
the good offices of the American Federation of
Arts and destined to travel in the United
States and Canada) provide a perfect source
for the study of Bonnard's artistic temerity.
They indicate the fatuousness of those
complacent historians who always put
Bonnard in some sort of late impressionist
limbo and who tell us about Bonnard's perfect
bourgeois choice of motifs — those comforting
still-lifes, warm interiors, housewives bathing
and Cote d'Azur landscapes. What they never
understand, and what other artists often
understand, is that the motif for Bonnard, as
for many twentieth-century artists, in no way
altered his incessant ruminations concerning
the nature of his art. Although Bonnard was
taciturn, even in the days when he participated
in the excitement of the Nabis and the Revue
Blanche in the 189os, he was given to fierce
interior dialogues about his work.
Occasionally he was overheard by some close
friend, and fragments of his thoughts recorded.
About those women, for instance: 'La charme
d'une femme peut se reveler beaucoup de choses
a un artiste sur son art.' His art, for Bonnard, was
more important than any particular domestic
scene or any particular landscape. He was
very much like a poet who, while limited to
such themes as love, and such images as water,
flowers and sky, can bring in his fresh responses
a new poem into existence. The words may be
hallowed, but the contexts . . . . (Looking at
Bonnard's many approaches to his own
established motifs I think of Leonardo who in
his treatise on water rattled off a wild list of
adjectives for himself, 'surging, vehement,
furious, impetuous' and so on, and worked with
a kind of verbal free association apposite to the
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