by Jon Lackman | 20 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Pierre Bonnard’s late interiors, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, attracted a number of approving reviews…
Christopher Benfey in Slate:
[Bonnard] painted from memory, relying on tiny penciled sketches and jotted notes to recover the mood and setting of scenes experienced long before. “Before I start to paint,” he said, “I meditate, daydream.” The result is a Proustian mix of actuality and reverie, as in this shimmering dreamscape, which has some of the fluid feel of a watercolor…
Once, in the Musée du Luxembourg, he had a friend distract the museum guard while he himself made a correction to one of his paintings on display. His friend Rouault invented a verb for constant revision: “Bonnarding.”
Antonio Muñoz Molina in El Pais:
In the Arctic January of New York, Pierre Bonnard is a hiatus of Mediterranean light and warm colors…
The Economist:
Like Matisse, Bonnard has been dismissively labelled a decorative artist, a painter of happiness. This exhibition should put an end to that. The 1946 “Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror” is almost terrifyingly bleak.
Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker:
No other way of painting could so thoroughly insult [Picasso’]s intellectually rigorous fortes of structure and line. Tissues of sheer sensation, Bonnard’s pictures stymie mental clarity as effectively as that postprandial extra glass of wine.
Karen Wilkin in the New Criterion ($):
His palpitating expanses of unnamable colors threaten to elude sight. Noonday light dazzles. Twilight blurs the distinctions between objects. Half-seen figures and vague incidents, dogs and cats, tug at our peripheral vision. Far from dealing in the inevitable, the immutable, or the final, Bonnard presents us with tantalizing glimpses of a world in flux.
Jed Perl in the New Republic:
He also has a quality that might be characterized as perceptual wit–an instinct for what will work in a painting. Almost invariably he recognizes the precise point where his voluptuousness may be getting out of hand, where he needs to introduce an ironic note…
One of the enigmas of Bonnard’s work–and the question must certainly be raised with the Virginia Museum painting–is why his warm-on-warm color orchestrations, while often approaching the exaggerations of kitsch, rarely go over the top. Especially in the 1940s, when he was working on this canvas, Bonnard liked to flirt with vulgarity. The walls in the Virginia Museum interior, composed of strokes of orange and violet and yellow paint, suggest melting sherbet. I think Bonnard knows this. He is making a joke. But just when it looks as if he has succumbed to a sort of high camp–and what could be less attractive than that?–he shifts gears.
See also Roberta Smith (NYT), Lance Esplund (WSJ) and Graham Nickson (Artcritical).
