- Good morning.
I am Dita Amory, the organizing curator
of the exhibition "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors"
and Acting Associate Curator
in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection.
It is a pleasure to introduce you
to an exhibition that has captured my attention
for the better part of four years.
Before we begin, I would like to thank
my collaborators in the museum,
whose encouragement and support
sustained my determination
to bring some of the most elusive paintings
of Bonnard's later years
to public view.
To Allie Stielau and Nicky Myers, my research associates,
Dale Tucker, my indefatigable editor,
Nina Maruca and the Registrar's Office,
Conservators Isabelle Duvernois, Akiko Yamazaki-Kleps,
and Rachel Mustalish.
To Rebecca Herman and the Press Office,
to Linda Sylling, Mike Batista, and especially Sue Koch
of the Design Department,
and to my wonderful colleagues in the Lehman Wing,
my heartfelt thanks.
I embarked on this project years ago
with a mission in mind.
Pierre Bonnard the painter was not given his due,
neither in the later years of his long career
nor in the decades to follow.
There was no room for his disquieting paintings,
and indeed for his particular approach to painting,
in the master narrative of French Modernism
as it took hold
in the first decades of the 20th century.
His ill fit in the company
of Picasso, Braque, Miró, and many others,
left Bonnard dangling.
He said so himself,
admitting that Cubism left him, quote, "hanging in air."
Art history texts have simply excised Bonnard
from any discussion
of French art in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.
At best, his legacy was linked to Impressionism.
He was called a "latter-day Impressionist,"
an anachronism,
an artist out of touch
with all that was new, radical, and risk-taking in art.
The closest Bonnard would come
to a place in history among the avant-garde
was as a member of the Nabis,
a short-lived association of Parisian artists
who emulated Gauguin, embraced the decorative in painting,
and shunned academicism.
In his Nabis years, Pierre Bonnard flourished
as a printmaker, illustrator,
and painter of decorative screens,
theater sets, and murals.
But the Nabis went their separate ways in 1900,
and Pierre Bonnard would paint for another 47 years.
It was Bonnard the painter of extraordinary light and color,
of disquieting imagery,
of spectral figures lurking in the margins,
of illogical spatial constructs--
it was that Bonnard who confounded critics.
Art historians have preferred to classify artists
practicing in the first half of the 20th century
according to a neat evolution of movements
that followed in orderly succession:
Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Conceptual, Abstraction, etc.
Pierre Bonnard,
and indeed his contemporary Henri Matisse,
to a lesser extent,
found no place in the pantheon.
Since Bonnard's death in 1947,
several important international exhibitions
have given us a chance to take another look at his art,
even if some only serviced the myth
of the artist as the Impressionist latecomer.
But these exhibitions in London, Paris,
Washington, New York, and elsewhere,
were expansive in scope,
often anthologies of painting that looked more broadly
at Bonnard's studio practice.
He made pictures for the better part of 60 years.
So I decided to take another lens to this elusive artist.
Believing that his finest masterpieces
were painted in his last decades,
I have assembled
a highly focused, relatively small exhibition
of the artist's interiors.
I left out the Bathers,
those ravishing paintings of Bonnard's wife, Marthe,
floating in the tub or toweling at her toilette,
since they tend to overwhelm the experience
of looking at the late pictures.
Marthe takes center stage in the bathtub in resonant ways,
formally, emotionally, and otherwise.
It is the memory of the Bathers that we often carry around
when we think retrospectively
of an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard.
My exhibition begins with material from the early 1920s
and closes with Bonnard's final pictures,
painted in his house in Le Cannet,
then a small village overlooking Cannes and the Mediterranean,
and now a sprawling suburb of holiday apartments.
Bonnard first discovered the Mediterranean in 1909,
traveling south from Paris
at the urging of fellow artist Henri Manguin.
Soon after marrying Marthe in 1925,
he bought his pink stucco villa,
which he named "Le Bosquet," "The Grove,"
and which he described to Matisse as, quote,
"the house on Avenue Victoria,
the highest in the neighborhood," end quote.
Bonnard would divide his time thereafter
between stays on the Mediterranean,
his house in Vernon, near Giverny,
his Paris apartment and studio,
and several seaside rentals in Normandy and Bordeaux.
It was not until the Second World War
that he reluctantly abandoned his peripatetic lifestyle.
Shortages of fuel, food, and art supplies
under the German occupation
left him housebound.
By then, he was in his mid-70s.
For Bonnard, painting was a very deliberate process,
a slow working-up of colored pigments on canvas.
The act of painting was an investigation,
an investigation of the physical substance of paint,
the visual rhymes echoing throughout the canvas,
the dialogue of color notes.
All of these formal considerations set him apart
from the conceptual art of his French contemporaries.
Pablo Picasso famously called Bonnard's painted palette,
quote, "a potpourri of indecision."
It was anything but an arbitrary assemblage of hues on canvas.
In fact, the tension of brushwork
that animates the late paintings
is precisely due to carefully considered color relationships
throughout the canvas rectangle.
Bonnard typically worked on several paintings at once,
all tightly tacked to the wall of his studio.
At any one moment, he may have had a combination
of landscapes, still lifes, bathers, and interiors
all in process.
Eccentric as it may sound,
he tacked the unstretched canvases to his studio wall
to allow him the freedom
to alter the dimensions of his image
as he painted.
Bonnard never pre-stretched his paintings onto stretcher bars
prior to discovering the image,
prior to taking possession of his subject.
At times, he even worked up several pictures
on one long length of canvas,
extending the full distance of the wall,
such was his need to order and re-order
the spatial field of his subject
right until its completion.
In the late interiors of my exhibition,
we discover a universe
of familiar rooms, familiar objects, familiar models.
Bonnard made it very clear
that he could only paint the familiar.
The rituals of daily life--
taking tea, feeding the cat, tending to the dinner table--
seem very straightforward, indeed, mundane,
and yet, in Bonnard's light-inflected world,
nothing is predictable.
His paintings are full
of mystery, irresolution, and imbalance,
and the more one looks at them,
the more one recognizes their many conundrums.
There is a reversal of logic to these paintings.
Space is not what it should be, skewed, truncated, contracted.
Figures come and go at the margins,
accessories, spectral, barely there.
No one speaks, no one looks up from self-referential reverie.
Flesh tones are never flesh-colored.
Figures blend right into their surrounding ground,
receding from importance rather than claiming it.
Color and its infinite relationships
become the metaphor
for Bonnard's experience of his subject.
These paintings are retrospectively experiential,
not perceptual.
As I have noted, Bonnard painted in the studio,
not in the dining room downstairs
or in the sitting room upstairs.
He resisted working from direct observation,
and once declared that working from life
meant surrendering to the object.
For Bonnard, painting from life
denied the necessary intrusion of memory and time,
and it was the memory of his experience,
filtered through time,
which fueled his inventive powers.
So if we submit to Bonnard's illogic,
we understand why these paintings,
drawn from the same pictorial field,
resonate very differently.
His use of color in the Guggenheim's picture at left
is rich and resplendent.
Bands of horizontal and vertical hues guide the eye
from the upended tabletop to the landscape beyond the window,
an exterior as inviting as its interior counterpart.
The window and garden of the painting at right
may cue us to the same domestic environment,
but no other points of reference cohere.
In the Guggenheim interior,
the rich, complex layers of color--
lavenders, iridescent blues, mottled red-greens--
seem to vibrate atop the hot red-orange tablecloth,
suggesting multiple layers of fabric.
Bonnard invites us to join him,
yet shares no understanding of the female lurking at right,
nor the ghost-like configuration of light at left.
Weight and substance are given sparingly
to the table's jugs and compotier,
and yet they, too, appear to float precariously in space.
The painting's fullness of color is indeed sumptuous,
to use a term often cited in the press.
Bonnard had something altogether different in mind
for his red, yellow, orange, white feast of light
in this painting currently in a private collection.
Using variable factures of paint,
he causes the surfaces to vibrate or tremble,
whether with white flanking the window
or yellow surrounding the table.
The thick, messy arc of yellow that circles the dining table,
a table now absolutely parallel to the picture plane,
appears to have come without modulation
right from the paint tube.
The painting is a tour de force of hot interlocking hues.
Its model barely registers at the right margin.
One is at pains to find her profile,
and yet her presence adds a powerful psychological tension,
a strange, disquieting human intrusion,
undifferentiated in palette.
The very same heat pervades "Interior Dining Room,"
where the often-painted red-white table setting
in the Le Cannet dining room
vibrates in its white-red- yellow-orange
choreography of color,
a spectrum of hues that truly reach a fever pitch.
And while the painting has many of the telltale devices
common to the late interiors--
the tilted tabletop,
dishes, trays, and wine bottles
hovering on the cool white and warm red surfaces,
and the female at the margins busying herself in some task,
her yellow hair perfectly consonant
with the yellows or yellow-oranges
that saturate other passages of the canvas--
while these elements appear as leitmotifs
throughout the exhibition,
this remarkable picture is wholly its own,
a palpitating feast of color.
In conversation with his Swiss collector Arthur Hahnloser,
Pierre Bonnard spoke
of having wrestled with the color white
all his life.
If any exhibition is exemplary of that sustained investigation,
it is indeed our current show.
Bonnard saw white as a staging ground for color.
Here, his radiant white tablecloth, itself a metaphor
for the rectangle of the artist's canvas,
is a counterpoint to the intense blues and muted purples
that both surround and punctuate the tabletop.
Once again, a seemingly haphazard array
of foodstuff and crockery
fill the void,
all an assortment of overlapping circular dishes
made more assertive by the inky blue shadows
that take on a life of their own.
"The White Interior," its descriptive title,
uses the color white in all its nuanced shades
as a color matrix
for one of Bonnard's most ambitious late pictures.
We immediately recognize its familiar appointments:
the upstairs sitting room of the Le Cannet house,
an interior that does indeed appear so often and so variantly
in our present exhibition.
Here, Bonnard has crafted his subject
using a series of overlapping angled planes
slicing through space.
Angles intrude and recede as the eye travels across the canvas.
The distant Mediterranean landscape and its reflection,
all circumscribed
by the horizontals and verticals of the window frames,
add another dimension of spatial complexity
to this powerful interior.
We cannot leave the painting
without noting its female figure,
who asserts her presence as an afterthought,
once the insistent geometry takes hold.
The stealthy female,
fully engaged in the act of feeding her cat,
blends with the red-black ground.
The arc of her body models the arc of the spatial ground.
And just as the color relationship of the figure
echoes the ground,
so does the furry cat echo the black-white marble floor
of the fireplace.
Bonnard builds his canvases
using these counterpoints of color.
If the often mysterious figures in these late paintings
tend to recede into their surrounding ground,
those in "The French Window" infuse the luminous interior
with a strong human presence.
Once again, we are in the upstairs sitting room
at Le Cannet.
Marthe as model stirs her cereal,
a quiet, contained presence at morning breakfast.
Behind her, the full-length mirror
reflects a second figure, probably Bonnard himself.
Bonnard may be drawing his model,
his own figure hidden by Marthe.
Above Marthe's head is an odd protuberance.
Right there.
Bonnard was given
to painting inscrutable forms and furnishings
in the late pictures,
forms that never quite attain focus.
Here, what lies between Marthe's head and the image of Bonnard
may be the reflection of the back of Marthe's head
as transposed in the mirror.
So while this painting would seem
to be about perception and illusion in paint,
we must remember that it was painted in the studio nearby,
its layers of illusion an invention.
Of its many implications,
the painting is a metaphor for the union
of artist and model, artist and muse, artist and life companion.
While I have dwelled on the psychology of the painting,
it is also a tour de force of color and light.
Bonnard once spoke of white
as lending luminosity to some bright colored spots.
His "French Interior" indeed exploits
the luminosity of white and of yellow.
Yellow and white spin a tapestry of color,
both highlighting and dissolving forms in space.
I've mentioned that Bonnard rarely worked from life,
but I haven't stressed that his studio practice
depended implicitly on drawings.
Bonnard drew every day,
and hardly a day passed
when he didn't take his small dog for a walk
in the garden or down the road.
He spent these hours drawing in small pocket diaries,
four of which are in the exhibition.
The tiny daybooks were a catch-all
for weather notations, grocery lists, musings of all sorts.
Above all else,
they captured Bonnard's first sketches for paintings.
Whether a landscape, a bather, or a still life,
his ambitious paintings first took hold
in rapid pencil sketches
on the pages of these modest diaries.
Of course, he sketched on larger sheets, as well,
and made highly finished gouache and watercolor drawings,
a selection of which are in the exhibition.
Bonnard kept his pencil studies in his studio all his life,
using their imagery to jog the memory of an experience
to be transmuted in paint.
I will close this brief exhibition review
with a painting begun in the 1920s
and completed only months before the artist died in January 1947.
It speaks to the period covered by the exhibition,
and its developmental history
is a very personal one for the artist.
As much as we know
of Bonnard's lifelong partnership with Marthe,
his model, his muse, his lover, and his needy companion,
we have scant knowledge of his other models.
Marthe may be the shadowy female
who appears and reappears in the late paintings,
but there were others who modeled for Bonnard,
especially in the early years,
and in those years, he painted directly from life.
Renée Monchaty was one such model.
They met around 1918.
She modeled for a great many paintings.
He took her to Rome in 1921, and they fell in love.
Bonnard proposed marriage to Renée,
never mind that jealous Marthe
had been his close companion and model for some 30 years.
When Marthe learned of the pending marriage,
she threw a fit and destroyed all the paintings in process
for which Renée had modeled.
Bonnard called off the marriage and abandoned Renée.
A few months later, he married Marthe,
and a few months after that, Renée committed suicide.
The painting now titled "Young Women in the Garden"
survived Marthe's rampage.
Bonnard was too devastated to re-enter it
following Renée's death.
Only after Marthe died in Le Cannet in 1942
did he complete his picture,
gilding it with a saffron yellow ground
in memory of his golden-haired model.
Marthe slips from view at the margins.
It has been a pleasure
to introduce you to the Bonnard exhibition,
and I hope you will take some time
to wander through the galleries,
for no digital reproduction of the late pictures
does justice to their radical explorations of color.
Thank you.
(applause)