11 Pierre Bonnard, Grey nude in profile, 1929
Bonnard’s life was more or less coeval with the French 3rd republic; he was born into the 2nd empire, which the Germans destroyed when he was a boy, & died after WW2, in which the Germans destroyed the 3rd republic. By then he was among the very famous painters in France, a great success in America, too, & elsewhere, one of the survivors of the turn of the 19th c. attempt to revolutionize art who avoided 20th c. innovations while becoming ever more respected, including by the eminent French painters of his time. His reputation since has collapsed. One of the causes of this change is his interest in domestic scenes that would only speak to a time in which private life & domesticity provide something like self-understanding—an imaginative articulation of sensitivity—at least for those classes concerned with themselves in that regard. This is not a great subject for art, but it was the subject that mattered at the last moment when the moral beliefs of a class were more important than the technology that powers modern life: What was to come of the bourgeoisie? The class, spreading across the world by its successes in commerce & politics, is a mystery to its members, who see themselves in modern art & find themselves impossible to comprehend: Beautified, they are safe from modern rationalism, but there is always something—modern psychology, medicine, pharmacology—hunting down what’s left of the beautiful belief in man’s eternal destiny. Bonnard as a young man met a woman who became his lifelong companion, his wife eventually, & he painted or drew her many times, as much to try to understand why he was fascinated by her as to consider how he lived with her. In this strange way, he fulfilled the destiny of the modern artist.
Bonnard preferred the nude to the portrait; this signals the transformation of public life into private life, & the specific inner necessity of private life—to overcome, or to leave behind, shame. Modern people insist on their individuality & therefore become creatures of their habits even as they abandon formality; they are interested in spontaneity, but not charm or grace. Among their possessions, they feel they can face their mortality, or at least go on with it. Life’s familiarity replaces self-knowledge or self-overcoming, a certain inevitability, perhaps an experience of fate. This is considered honesty, which is necessary in a time of great, unpredictable, uncontrollable changes. Thus, this young woman; is she an ideal—her relaxed attitude, her healthy & therefore natural pose, her innocent gestures that make us think of animals—or is she typical of the modern world? Look at the room, which replaces clothing: A white bathroom is a very modern thing, it speaks to us of cleanliness; this is not the best taste—it is contrasted to the superior, poetic rather than scientific, taste of the Romans: Notice the colorful, patterned floor, perhaps something that recalls the sea. Between the two tastes, the bathroom is inundated by the golden light of the sun, visible as itself only where it is somehow obscured, by the open blinds, or also reflected in the water in the tub. The human body is unlike either, it is almost golden like the sun, because it is alive—this we would call nature & thus we would become mystified by its setting, this bathroom; what is its specific goodness, what makes it receive the warmth of the sun as its own? The floor must be cold, not only dark; everything else, tile & metal, must also be cold, but, being white, conceals it. Everything here is an invitation to come to understand the sun. A first question arises, does the light clean the body in the way water does? Why do we love the water, aside from its solar warmth? A second question arises: What is the relationship between touch & sight, the causal & cognitive senses—she feels sunlight on her skin with her closed eyes, whereas we see her & cannot touch—or the conditions of experience? The sun generates shadows as well as light, because it generates light & because it is not the only being. The sun then, we can say, is the cosmos which she passively receives; Bonnard suggests that there is a way of life based on this awareness of the sun open to us, or perhaps that we are tempted by it. The artist, however, also has something in common with the sun, generating a kind of world, or an image of the world.
12 Monet, House among the roses, 1925