Page 42 - Studio International - November 1972

formal and colouristic free-associations
(Below)
Boats on the Seine (near Vernon) c. 1928
Pencil, 41 x 6 in.
(Bottom)
Landscape (Gannet) c. 1941
Pencil, 5 x 8 in.
(Opposite page top left)
The Cat c. 1920
Pencil, 12 7/8 x 9 7/8 in.
(Opposite page top right)
The Seine near Vernon c. 1925
Pencil, 4 x 4 1/2 in.
(Opposite page bottom)
Nude in the Bath 1925
Pencil, 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.
190
vision, on the other hand, is both 'mobile' and
Bonnard found in his motifs.) Bonnard was a `variable'. The artist's job is to exercise
lifelong reader of Mallarmé. perception knowingly.
History always seems to double back on The drawings, ranging from 1893 to the
itself and Bonnard's case is interesting. His year before his death in 1947, are mobile,
point of view, quite literally, has come around variable and also astonishingly varied. Bonnard
again. That is, the critical apparatus in much was not a man of method, but a man of
recent literature has come to stress 'perception' visionary intent. Accordingly he was free to
as the basis of aesthetic judgment. Often we use any approach which he felt would bring
are offered definitions of perception in lieu of him closer to realizing his vision. He was also
criticism. Perception was one thing Bonnard free to enjoy himself at will. Surely the fine
knew a lot about, and occasionally he talked animal studies, with their tendency to
about it. How contemporary his remarks about caricature (in the good French tradition, think
`human vision' sound! The camera, he claimed, only of the witty dog studies by Fragonard) are
could never displace the living artist because moments in an artist's life of humour. Certain
the camera is always giving us all kinds of of the landscapes and a few interiors also
useless shadows and lights and details. Human bespeak a relaxed, off-duty man of simple
pencil pleasures. But on the whole, this body of
drawings, usually from small sketch-pads,
confirms Bonnard's complex inquiry into his
art; his need to create a closed, rhyming
universe. A universe, however, can never be
`intimate'.
Patrick Heron has spoken in detail of
Bonnard's idiosyncratic approach to the
horizontals of landscape. In his drawings of
elongated nudes in bathtubs (and in the
superb painting at the Tate) Bonnard has
many visual similes in mind. Here, in the small
sketches, it is possible to see several studies of
the Seine in which the horizontal flow of the
river bisecting the page is equivalent to the
horizontal flow of the nude immersed in her
bath. When Bonnard developed these sketches
in paintings, the matter became even more
complicated, and the closed-open universe more
detailed. But in the initial vision, the intent is
clear : to find the connections between
perceptions of living light and matter. To this
end, Bonnard invented countless vocabularies
over the years, and never hesitated to retrieve
from his past the idiom which would make
precise a particular vision. All the dots,
commas, zigzags and scribbles are merely
signs to himself; indications of connections
which might, which would, be made when finally
he committed himself to canvas.
As Heron has said, Bonnard contrived several
perspectival innovations from which the
attentive modern artist since his death might
have profited. Yet, it seems to me that Bonnard,
while always seeking to close off an image
(often rounding contours, and suggesting a
cocoon-like interior structure) was still more
free than Heron allows. The man who could
understand both Mallarmé and Jarry, as his
drawings of the earlier epochs amply prove, was
not one to ponder such minor problems as
`edges' discrete from the total complex of his
visual universe. It's true that when he was
given a mural to do in the foyer of the theatre
of the Palais de Chaillot, he remarked, 'They
gave me a square and I managed to destroy it'.
But even such indications of his point of view
don't sum it up. The only summing up about
Bonnard that there can be lies in the
experience of looking at Bonnards. q