The Brooklyn Rail

Bonnard’s Worlds, a retrospective currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum and traveling to the Phillips Collection in 2024, is aptly named. Spanning almost five decades and comprised of 70 paintings, the show opens with bustling Parisian street scenes and panoramic Riviera landscapes. Instead of progressing chronologically, Nabi canvases are hung beside works from later in the artist’s career, and it’s all of one piece, as it turns out. In this brilliant installation, we discover, gallery by gallery, all sorts of nooks and crannies gleaned from the everyday life of artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947). There are enclosed gardens as well as light-filled interiors. We find ourselves in dining rooms, sitting at breakfast tables, visiting the artist’s studio, in front of open windows, facing a kitchen cupboard, admiring baskets of fruit atop patterned cloths, in the privacy of bedrooms and baths. Flowers bloom outdoors and they are arranged in vases. In addition to the portrayal of a large family gathering in 1902, the painter depicted his own relatives playing croquet in a canvas from 1892, and his wife Marthe posed with one of their beloved dachshunds in 1922. In even more intimate domestic moments, he portrayed Marthe soaking in a cast iron tub in three canvases he executed in 1936, 1937-39, and 1941-46.

For the most part, Bonnard seems to have enjoyed a relatively unencumbered life, first in Normandy and then in the south of France. His palette is dominated by yellows, blues, greens, a touch of orange, a splash of purple—the vibrant colors of his surroundings. Nabi motifs give way to paintings of scenes the artist would execute from memory.

After his youthful dalliance as a member of the short-lived Nabi movement—he was in his twenties during its heyday from 1888–1900—Bonnard never again joined a movement. Though he painted with radiant colors, he never became a Fauve artist. And as complex as some of his compositions became, he was never interested in constructing a Cubist work, though he admired them. Bonnard’s World celebrates his singular visions.

Dining Room in the Country (1913) reveals much about Bonnard’s modus operandi. It’s a painting that seems relatively straightforward until you suddenly realize that it's quite complicated. For starters, our eyes roam around an orange-colored interior and, through an open door and a large window, an overgrown landscape outside the artist’s home in Vernonnet, a small town on the Seine. During a period when many painters favored a reductive approach to their art, Bonnard was constantly adding all sorts of details rather than subtracting or taking them away.

Dining Room in the Country is packed with elements. Near a round table on which three circular plates hold fruit, a white cat rests on a comfortable chair. Nearby—and outdoors—Marthe, also dressed in orange, leans on the windowsill while another woman wearing a scarf on her head blends in with the garden. A second cat is perched on a chair on the other side of the table and a sideboard holds a jug with flowers and a smaller box. If we were to physically enter this room, both felines ordinarily would be glimpsed with our peripheral vision. The artist did this repeatedly: put stuff towards the edges of his canvases that initially would not be noticed at first glance. He would also meld people and animals with their backgrounds as he did here with the scarf-clad woman in the overrun garden.

Bonnard depicted many windows and open doors in his work. Often, they were not parallel with the picture plane, as they would be in the art of colleagues like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Here, both are at angles. Curves abound as do diagonals. As viewers, we don’t think twice about all the complex geometries. They seem as natural as the riotous plants growing outside. This is, to be sure, a polyphonic setting. Decades in the future, would this master of color and vibrant details have been a pattern and decoration artist? I suspect so.

Again and again, Bonnard makes us conscious that we are looking at oil pigments layered on canvases. Figures, animals, little children, bowls of fruit are depicted with the same colors of the elements surrounding them so that they are not readily apparent. You need to pay attention to every detail that the artist depicts. Years ago, with a friend, I wondered why Marthe was so often represented in a bathtub. The other day, I was more intrigued that we literally look down at her immersed in water. And then, there are all those decorative touches as she bathes: tiled floors and walls, a cornucopia of autumnal colors. We sit at Bonnard’s tables, look out his windows, smell the flowers, bask in the sunshine. Perhaps Matisse put it best when he described Fruit Basket(c. 1946), a painting that he enjoyed on the walls of his own living room. He told his friend the painting was “mysterious and alluring.”