Pierre Bonnard - Mantelpieces and Masterpieces

A reminder of a very funny line from Only Fools and Horses is not quite where you expect your imagination to head after gazing at one of Pierre Bonnard's paintings.  Del Boy had entered one of Rodney's secondary school paintings into a competition to win a holiday in Spain.  The trouble was, Rodney wasn't thirteen anymore.  Not that this was going to stop Del Boy from accepting the prize and getting Rodney to pass for a young teenager.  Young Rodney's painting was called 'Marble Arch at Dawn' and he reminded everyone that his art-teacher had called it a masterpiece.  Del Boy corrected him: "No, he said it was a mantelpiece!"

Anyway, that wonderful bit of comic bathos came to mind as I was standing in front of Bonnard's 1916 painting The Mantelpiece.  And, needless to say, just because an artist tackles a corner of the living room rather than a national monument, it doesn't in any way signal mediocrity.  

Pierre Bonnard, The Mantelpiece (1916)

Bonnard's choice of subject, particularly in the later work, tends towards the homely.  Indeed, there is a second 'mantelpiece' (or manteau de cheminée if we wish to lose the English lumpenness) in the wonderful retrospective currently showing at Tate Modern.  The larger portion of the paintings on display feature the artist's various abodes, and even when the views drift outside, they often do so from a place of comfort, looking out of the kitchen door from the cool shade of a cosy corner.  Yet a repetitive homeliness does not mean that these paintings should not be considered masterpieces.  Whilst there might not be anything particularly pioneering about Bonnard's art, what we do have is a body of work that is executed with the greatest skill and one that mesmerises and demands quiet and frequent applause.       

I first fell in love with the work of Bonnard after seeing his early painting Nu aux bas noires in a Sheffield art gallery.  Delicate, sensual and intimate, it did far more than kill an idle hour, taking up residence in my consciousness and refusing to move out.

Nu aux bas noires (1900)

In fact, the only disappointment that I encountered in this exhibition was that it hadn't found its way down from the north of England and given me a chance to look again.  But it did give me the opportunity to contrast the memory of the softer, darker tones of that painting with the later work on display here, more often than not ablaze with colour and - dare I say it - a contented and largely safe middle age. 

With that thought, we are back in the realm of the homely and the commonplace again.  And maybe that's where Bonnard is happiest.  I recall Julian Barnes writing about the painter and the quiet devotion he had to his wife Marthe.  She features in so many of his paintings, often undressing, or sitting down to dine with friends, or just lingering on the periphery (what happens at the edges of Bonnard's work seems to matter a great deal).

Dining Room In the Country

Dining Room in the Country captures a moment of casual domesticity, Marthe, seemingly surprised - there's an accidental quality of the snapshot to this wonderful painting - glancing towards the viewer, crimson dress and complementary lipstick drawing our gaze.  Edgar Degas' remark that 'Bonnard cherishes the accidental' is apposite.  It is also a painting that illustrates one of Bonnard's most distinctive traits, the slightly elevated viewpoint that allows him to flatten objects, particularly those that occupy dining tables.  Of course, we are in the age of the great Modernists, so again, there's nothing groundbreaking happening here - Matisse had been doing it for years - but the execution is masterful and the wealth of colour sumptuous.  Up close, honing in on individual aspects of the painting is a joy: the soft hints of lilac glancing across the tablecloth, the blue afternoon haze slowly draining of colour as your eye ascends, and always returning to the remarkable, mischievous red of Marthe. 

When the paintings, so to speak, venture out into the wider world, a sense of danger returns.  As if the bliss that Bonnard has carefully curated is threatened the further away from Marthe that he gets.  Indeed, he dabbled in an affair with one of his models Renee Monchaty, taking a trip to Rome with her.  Bonnard would soon cast Renee adrift and she would commit suicide a year later.  That visit to Rome features one of those 'wider world' paintings, the unsettling and, at first, underwhelming Piazza del Popolo, Rome. 

Piazza del Popolo, Rome (1920)

There it is again, that slightly elevated viewpoint, as if the artist is standing on a box.  But here, maybe Bonnard is hinting towards more distant temporal precedents than the likes of Matisse?  The ochre wall that intrudes slightly into the left edge of this painting (remember, the edges matter in Bonnard) belongs to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, the home to two extraordinary Caravaggios.  One of those, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, is famous for its own startling point of view.

Caravaggio, Conversion on the Road to Damascus (1601)

Just as we are looking down on Bonnard's table-cloths and their contents, and perhaps most pertinently, stalls filled with oranges, Caravaggio allows us to be almost completely on top of St Paul, his arms stretched out to the sky, his orange cloak spread beneath him.   Look, too, to the slight bowing of the head of Paul's groom and the woman mirroring him as she looks down at her child in Bonnard's painting.  My interest in this painting is suddenly heightened.  Is it a tribute to the Italian, or is it a moment of serendipitous inspiration after leaving the chapel that housed Caravaggio's masterpiece?  A little bit of both, perhaps.   

Yet it is the vibrant and explosive colours of late-Bonnard that stay with you.  Two of my three favourite paintings in this exhibition explode upon the retinas.  The Open Window, Yellow Wall, a relatively small and square painting, dazzles with mauve, green, blue, burgundy, orange, and, most strikingly, yellow.  You are drawn into each separate colour, peering closely at the canvas from less than a foot away (and invariably setting the wire-alarm off).  But then you step back to revel again in the whole as it cascades over you. 

The Open Window, Yellow Wall (1919)

Then there is The Studio With Mimosa.  It has an almost identical composition and subject to The Open Window, Yellow Wall (but in a totally different house) and is an even richer treat for the senses.  You can almost imagine that Marthe's face, intruding into the bottom left of the painting, is being pulled onto the canvas by the rich scent of those flowers.  Yellow is again to the fore, and it is a yellow as rich and vibrant as any that ever found its way onto one of Van Gogh's canvases.  In fact, the last three rooms of the gallery are painted in Naples Yellow, the colour of Bonnard's sitting room in the south of France.  This is a lovely touch by the curators, and it ensures that the last section of the exhibition conjures up the word this is most often attached to the artist and his work: 'happiness'. 

The Studio With Mimosa (1945) 

It is too easy, though, to get carried away with the richness and variety of Bonnard's palette.  There is also much that is understated, not least in the painting that has stayed with me the longest.  A discreet and slightly melancholy nude of Marthe, seen from behind as she prepares to take a bath, initially seems quite modest, but when you start to spend any amount of time in its company, it begins to exude a luminous and otherworldly quality.

Bathing Woman, Seen From the Back (1919) 

Marthe's back reflects a warm, golden light contrasting with the dressing gown to her right, a carapace that, nevertheless, seems to retain faint glimmers from the body that has just discarded it.  All else fades towards neutral tones of blue and grey and mauve.  It is an exquisite and intimate piece of art that almost takes me back to the moment when I first discovered Bonnard in that Sheffield art gallery.

Just like Rodney Trotter, Bonnard did not escape the put-downs of his contemporaries.  Picasso remarked that what Bonnard did 'was not painting', observing that sensibility is not enough to make an artist.  Picasso's standards were his own though, and if we judge everything in that way, very little will meet the mark.  But even bearing that in mind, I think Bonnard brings something incredible and stirring to the table.  It may not be wholly original, it may not have the panache and daring of Matisse or the Spaniard, but what it does have is an enormously contented human quality, one that speaks of a life that is full of colour, warmth, sensuality and comfort.  These paintings are nothing short of masterpieces.