COLORFUL INSIDE STORY
SOME people just can’t let go. Take Pierre Bonnard, who spent months and even years on a painting – reworking until the light looked just right and the colors sang.
On his deathbed, loath to let go, he begged his nephew to add a little more yellow to a canvas.
His last and perhaps greatest works – along with four datebooks full of sketches and weather reports – are now on display at the Met. The 45 paintings – suffused with the Mediterranean light that spilled into his home in the South of France, a croissant’s throw from Cannes – make “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” a perfect antidote to a gray winter’s day.
Bonnard (1867-1947) painted in the shadow of the Impressionists, but while he palled around with Matisse, he had his own way of working. Other painters took their work outside, but not Bonnard: He didn’t even use an easel, but simply tacked unstretched canvases to his studio walls – still lifes, landscapes, nudes – pinning them up next to each other and working on several pieces at once.
He loved the familiar, which is why the same basket, dogs and women appear in painting after painting.
“Someone once asked him to paint a vase of flowers, and he declined,” says curator Dita Amory. “He said he hadn’t lived with them long enough.”
The one he did live with was Marthe Bonnard, his model, muse and, many say, jailer. A woman of delicate disposition (probably depression), she sought release in hydrotherapy, which is why there are so many paintings of her in her bath. The couple went to Europe’s spas together – she’d take the waters while he’d hole up in a hotel, working away.
She’s often a ghostly presence hovering on the fringes of his still lifes, adding a sense of mystery, even sadness, to scenes of domestic tranquility.
You’ll see her in “The French Window (Morning at Le Cannet),” sitting at a checkered tablecloth under a reflection of Bonnard in the mirror. And there might be a bit of her head in “Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room),” which is a still life and landscape in one.
Here the cozy clutter of coffee things, fruit and bread seems sparse compared with the lushness beyond the window. The trellis pattern of the curtains (or is it the wallpaper?) suggests the outdoors, while the balcony railing outside looks like a row of wine goblets on the march.
In “Young Women in the Garden,” Marthe isn’t alone. The other woman – in every sense – is Renée Mon chaty, a blond model Bonnard fell in love with before his marriage to Marthe. He and Renée ran off to Rome together, and when they returned to France, he proposed.
Marthe threw a fit, destroying every painting she could find with Renée in it. Bonnard broke the engagement; Renée killed herself soon after.
The painting he’d started of them in 1921 was left unfinished. More than 20 years later, after Marthe’s death, he finally finished it, giving his lost love a bright gold halo.
“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” runs through April 19 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 81st Street; metmuseum.org.
