Pierre BONNARD (1867 - 1947)

Provenance:  
Madame Eugène Zak, 1947 
Jeanne Castel Collection, Paris 
Collection Arthur Jeffress, London 
Collection of Mrs A.E. Pleydell-Bouverie, London 
Sotheby's sale, June 12 1963, n°62  
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil G. Bernstein   
Private collection, Switzerland  

Exhibitions :  
Pierre Bonnard, Centenaire de sa naissance, Haus der Kunst, München, October 8, 1966-January 1, 1967, then Musée du Louvre, January 13-April 15, 1967, reproduced in the German exhibition catalog under no. 23 and in the French catalogue under no. 28.  

Bibliography:  
Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: catalog raisonné de l'oeuvre peint , vol. 1 (1888 - 1905), Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1974, no. 88.
 

L'INTIME CONVICTION DU SUD

To understand the Bonnard in love with the South, crocheting light and color into his palette, you first need to have seen the other Bonnard, the one of chilly winters and gray mornings.  You need to have known the "very Japanese Nabi", his meticulous layouts, superimposing points of view, his tight, daring framing, his exploration of flatness, with the Japanese print as source and model. 
Like Vuillard, Vuillard's friend delights in the intimacies he recreates. Dining rooms and bedrooms are conducive to revealing subtle atmospheres, rendered in contrasting hues, with an economy of palette that would later no longer characterize him.  For the artist, nocturnal entertainment venues and the street itself also became enclosed spaces through framing, enabling him to extract a fragment of intimacy, like a clear cut to the heart of passing life.   

Around 1895, Bonnard was still a Nabi. His preoccupations were similar to those of this spontaneous movement of young prophets of painting, but his spectrum began to broaden, and his interest focused more on the rendering of atmospheres.  Soon, in 1904, he would discover the South, and then... nothing would ever be the same again. He wrote to his mother in a phrase that has remained famous throughout his career: "I was struck by the Thousand and One Nights. The sea, the yellow walls, the reflections as colorful as the lights...". It's a dazzling, sensual, unabashedly greedy palette. Landscapes exult, light spreading like an immense, tender, joyous wave. Bonnard has tasted paradise on earth. It was in Le Cannet that he would end his days, putting all his strength into his painting.

For the time being, in the embroiderer's workshop, he creates a cocoon of intimacy from this foreground wrapped in furs and dark fabrics. 
Against the light, the two women, in profile and three-quarter view, calmly go about their business around white linen. They might as well be sitting face to face in the carriage of a train, off on a journey to a distant countryside... But on the other side of the window, passers-by in hats cross the city on a cold day. Where are they hurrying off to? To the milliner perhaps, to the dressmaker, or to Trousselier, the famous artificial flower house where Marthe worked when Bonnard met her...

Marthe the muse, the woman. The one Bonnard would always swear by, even though he wasn't always faithful to her. Yet he gave her his final preference by marrying her after a long life together, forsaking for her the young, blond Renée, the one who drowned in sadness in her bathtub.  Marthe's shady, exclusive character and the constant precautions she took to protect her health were, for many, what kept Bonnard away from the outside world. She had little pleasure in socializing with other people, and jealously guarded the purr of a life for two that was never drowned out by a child's cry. However, she seems to have a genuine complicity with Suzanne, wife of Gaston Bernheim, Bonnard's regular dealer since 1906. A photograph shows the two of them together, with Bonnard, in the outfit they wear when they are portrayed here in bust form, deep in conversation. In the photo, their dogs frolic at their feet. Perhaps they understood each other...