Pierre Bonnard
French, 1867-1947
Garden with Small Bridge (Le Jardin au Petit pont), 1937
oil on canvas
39 x 48 7/8 in.
SBMA, Bequest of Wright S. Ludington
1993.1.1
Bonnard Self Portrait
RESEARCH PAPER
The Artist
It is a paradox, noting Pierre Bonnard's long and distinguished career in France, that in the United States where the French Impressionists found so many early and fervent champions, that their "spiritual heir," Bonnard, found fame so late. Although he was revered in Paris by his colleagues, all artists admired in America, success in America alluded Bonnard for some 50 years.(1)
Bonnard grew up during the complex, and exuberant period of the last years of the Nineteenth Century. He was an intensely private rnan, yet restless. His art was affected by many of the then-current ideas, yet he remained independent of them. He was not interested in competing with his contemporaries; rather, he was interested in competing with the history of art.(2) He was reluctant to be tied to an any prescriptive theory of painting. For him the only "solid ground" for the painter was palette and tones.(3) He was a colorist, one with the ability to capture an array of nuances.(4)
Bonnard was part of the avant -garde. He and his friends from the Academie Julian, formed a movement of sorts, and called themselves the Nabis (Hebrew for "prophet"). The Nabis were influenced by Paul Gauguin and the Symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarme. The Nabis were not interested in capturing the effect of light and color as the Impressionists. Instead, they sought to manipulate color and composition to evoke a mood or feeling.(5)
While some speculate that Gauguin sparked Bonnard's interest in pure hues, most generally agree that Japanese woodblock prints showed Bonnard how to think in terms of pure color. It was the Japanese woodblock print that opened Bonnard's art to the color and vitality of contemporary life.(6) He learned that he could use color to express everything without the need for texture or relief. He learned that color could express light, shape and character, without the need for values. From Japanese prints, Bonnard learned that color patterns could be as eloquent as shadow patterns.(7)
Unlike the archetypal Impressionist painter, Bonnard found it impossible to paint before the motif. To him, nature was endlessly distracting and color had its own independent life, a logic all its own.(8) Although accounts differ about his actual working method, all agree that Bonnard divided his colors between warm and cool.(9)
Bonnard admired Renoir, but it was Motet who meant the most to him.(10) Bonnard's ultimate debt to Monet lay in the belief that art began in the sensation of being overwhelmed by the beauty of nature. Bonnard began each day with a ritual early morning walk carrying a small pad wherein he sketched the sensations of small incidents that caught his eye. The drawings from these morning strolls later became the subjects of paintings he executed back in his studio.(11)
The Art
After 1933, Bonnard increasingly focused on the Le Cannet landscape near Cannes (where he had settled in 1926). Early in 1935, he wrote to Matisse: "For the time being I am taking walks in the countryside and trying to see it as a peasant does." Not long after that, he announced in a letter to his friend and fellow artist, Eduard Vuillard. "I've become a landscape painter not because I've painted landscapes, I've done very few, but because I've acquired the soul of a landscapest having finally rid myself of the picturesque, aesthetic and other conventions which had been poisoning me...."(12)
Jardin au Petit Pont may be a misleading title as it does not appear to depict a specific location. Some surmise that Bonnard may have composed the painting as an amalgam of Le Cannet motifs. It has also been suggested that Bonnard was working on this painting when visited by an old friend, Felix Feneon. According to Feneon, Bonnard, while working on the painting, would periodically refer to a small sketch, about twice the size of his hand, on which he had jotted notes of the dominant colors of the motif. For the first few days the subject of the painting was unrecognizable. But, on the eighth day it became apparent that the subject was indeed a landscape in which a house appeared in the distance, along with various figures of women, children and dogs in the middle and foregrounds. At this point Feneon noticed that Bonnard no longer referred to his sketch. Rather, he would step back to contemplate the effect of the juxtaposed colors and occasionally dab a bit of color with his finger, then add another dab next to the first. Finally. around the 15th day, Feneon asked his friend how long he thought it would take him to finish the painting. Bonnard simply replied that he had finished it that morning.(13)
Jardin au Petit Pont has none of the structure associated with traditional landscapes. The elements of the composition are piled up, not distributed in depth of space. Everything, even the small patches of blue sky are brought forward and represented on a single plane. The entire canvas is covered with color, spots and tangled shapes through which no apparent air circulates. It's as though all classical forms of imagery and composition have been exploded.
There is a garden path, generally a perspective device, bit it runs up the canvas rather than moving deep into the garden. Forms are difficult to identify at first glance. If is not until one contemplates the scene for a time that figures emerge in the garden and a house appears in the distance.(14) Bonnard places some objects (i.e., the small bridge, a woman carrying a child and two small children playing) on the lower edge of the composition where they are abruptly cut off by the edges of the painting. This device cleverly allows the viewer to feel closer to the scene rather than be just a spectator from a distance.
In studying Jardin au Petit Pont, it is easy to see how Bonnard makes a virtue of excess. This excess is associated with Bonnard's sympathy for the unpredictability of nature, and with the wonderful riot and disorder of an overgrown garden.(15)
Conclusion
An essential part of Bonnard's achievement was the convinced flouting of conventions of color and form. But, his determined avoidance of innovation for innovation's sake left him on the fringes of the avant garde around the time of the First World War. Bonnard himself recognized:
... when I and my friends adopted the Impressionists' colour programme in order to build on it we wanted to go beyond naturalistic colour impressions - art, however, is not nature - We wanted a more rigorous composition. There was also so much more to extract from colour as a means of expression. But developments ran ahead, society was ready to accept Cubism and Surrealism before we had reached what we had viewed as our ami…In a way we found ourselves hanging in mid air…(16)
Thus, the irony was that Impressionism was both a starling point and a trap for Bonnard.(17) Yet it is acknowledged that Bonnard was not hostile to modern developments in art, rather he simply absorbed what he needed for his own experiments with color and form. As a result, Bonnard is in some ways a deceptive artist because his experiments were far more radical than one may realize at first glance.
He fervently believed it his prerogative to embellish his subject matter. He cherished the accidental. His art was meditative to an extraordinary degree, as aptly illustrated by Jardin au Petit Pont. As a result, his art evokes an extremely personal, almost intimate feeling with touches of whimsy. This remarkable quality was recognized early on by Renoir who in a letter written to Bonnard in 1896 stated, "You have a note of charm, do not neglect it ... It's a precious gift.(18) Jardin au Petit Pont reminds us that Bonnard, working years later, effectively heeded Renoir's advice.
(1) In France, however, Bonnard achieved popularity when lie first burst on the scene in 1891 and he remained popular for the rest of his long life. Even when he left Paris for seclusion is the French countryside, he continued to sell any painting he produced. Soby, James Thrall, Elliott, James and Wheeler, Monroe, Bonnard and His Environment, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1964, p. 11.
(2) Meisler, Stanley, Pierre Bonnard, Smithsonian Magazine (issue unknown, excerpt in Docent Office Files).
(3) Watkins, Nicholas, Bonnard Colour and Light, Tate Gallery Publishing, London 1998. p. 44. (4) Sutton, Denys, Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London 1966. p. 22.
(5) Meisler.
(6) Bonnard found enough stimulus in Japanese woodblock prints to last his lifetime. "A print by Hiroshige joined reproductions of Gaugin's Vision After the Sermon, Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres and paintings by Renoir, Vermeer and Picasso on his studio wall of fame, his ancestor wall, at Le Cannet. Watkins p. 34.
(7) Watkins 1998, p. 35.
(8) Bonnard's highly inventive color compositions grew out of experience rather than from theory. Watkins 1998, p. 44.
(9) According to his nephew, Charles Terrasse, front the mid-1920's, Bonnard kept a warm and cool palette and mixed the colors for each on a separate plate, allowing the successive layers of crusty paint to accumulate suggestively. One studio visitor noted how Bonnard kept a separate plate, an improvised plate, for each painting. Watkins 1998, p. 44.
(10) Sutton 1966, p. 22-23.
(11) Watkins 1998, p. 63.
(12) Thomson 1994, p. 20.
(13) Thomson 1994, p. 70.
(14) In his essay, Seeing Bonnard, John Elderfield makes an astute observation about Bonnard's work: “He requires that a painting be slowly absorbed, be savoured, so that its surprises well up, one after another, into the field of perception and thereby articulate the original seductive vision in its performative representation by the beholder." Whitfield, Sarah and Elderfield, John, Bonnard, Tate Gallery Publishing. London 1998. p. 14.
(15) Whitfield 1998, p. 14.
(16) Thomson 1994. p. 24.
(17) It was a trap in the sense that the style carried with it the limiting expectations of a market well established. As a result some have criticized Bonnard for producing at times somewhat superficial canvases. In addition to working in and transforming what was essentially an "outmoded" style, Bonnard effectively lost any claim to leadership of the avant garde. Thomson 1994, p. 23.
(18) Thomson 1994, p. 12.
Bibliography
Soby, James Thrall, Elliott, James and Wheeler. Monroe, Bonnard and His Environment, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1964.
Sutton, Denys, Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat.. Royal Academy of Arts, London 1966.
Thomson, Belinda and Mann, Sargy. Bonnard at Le Bosquet, exh. cat., The South Bank Centre, London 1994.
Watkins, Nicholas, Bonnard Colour and Light, Tate Gallery Publishing, London 1998.
Whitfield, Sarah and Elderfiel, John, Bonnard, Tate Gallery Publishing, London 1998.
Meisler, Stanley, Pierre Bonnard, Smithsonian Magazine (issue unknown, excerpt in Docent Office Files)
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Priscilla Brown Sims, March 27, 2001
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Bonnard was a member of the group known as the Nabis. Along with Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel, these younger artists embraced the example afforded by their ringleader, Paul Gauguin, who wielded vivid hues applied in flat planes of color with strong contouring lines, freed from normative conventions of description. By the time that Bonnard executed this tapestry of color, he had fully assimilated the lessons of Impressionism, with its adaptation of high-keyed colors and a non-hierarchical flattening of space derived from Japanese woodblock prints. However, unlike the Impressionists, Bonnard’s art was invested in experience as colored by recollection, rather than the instantaneity of direct perception. This landscape is not a record of a specific location, but a composite of several elements of parks and gardens in Le Cannet, the Riviera town where he had lived since the 1920s. Bonnard’s lack of concern with spatial coherence makes it difficult to locate the “small bridge” specified by the title, though it could be articulated by the curved forms outlined in black at the composition’s lower right corner. Thinly painted in jewel-like tones, as if using oil to accomplish the translucency of watercolor, the image has the shimmering ambiguity of a dream.
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