Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch
development had gained such momentum that society was ripe to accept Cubism and Surrealism long before we had achieved our goal. We found ourselves in an uncertain position.”[21]
Pierre Bonnard, Family Scene, 1893. Colour lithograph, 31 × 18 cm, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
Pierre Bonnard, The Parade Ground, 1890. Oil on canvas, 23 × 31 cm, Private Collection, Paris.
It is hardly surprising that at the beginning of the twentieth century the young artists who joined the avant-garde considered the work of Bonnard and other artists of his circle rather old-fashioned and dull. They were completely overwhelmed by Matisse’s Red Room and The Dance and by Picasso’s Cubist experiments. Bonnard’s Mirror in the Dressing-Room was painted at the time when Matisse and Picasso were creating some of their famous still lifes, including Picasso’s Composition with a Skull, now in the Hermitage collection, and Matisse’s Red Room, which is halfway to being a still life. Comparing all these works, one is bound to appreciate Matisse’s and Picasso’s unusual boldness, yet one is also sure to realise how much painting would have lost without Bonnard, already outside the mainstream of artistic development.
Mirror in the Dressing-Room is a wonderful illustration of how Bonnard used the lessons learned from the Impressionists, and from Degas in particular. At the same time it exemplifies the complete subordination of Impressionistic elements to a deeply individual and in essence non-Impressionistic conception. It would hardly be justified to speak here of the relationship between a pupil and his teachers. Mirror in the Dressing-Room clearly shows that structurally Bonnard’s work was far more complicated than that of the Impressionists. Never in any of their still lifes did the Impressionists use so many motifs as well as compositional and spatial devices forming one integral whole; nor did they ever place such surprisingly diverse objects in apposition.
Pierre Bonnard, A Barracks Scene, 1890. Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 32.5 cm, Private Collection.
Edgar Degas, Mister Perrot’s Dance Lesson, 1873–1875. Oil on canvas, 85 × 75 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
When Impressionism was in its heyday, Renoir painted an unusual still life, A Bunch of Flowers in front of a Mirror (1876, Private Collection, Paris). Looking at this fleeting vision of bright flowers, one finds it difficult to tell which of the two bunches is real; and the painter took pleasure in exploiting this effect. In Bonnard’s work the mirror plays a different role. It has already been stated that no other feature reveals Bonnard’s divergence from the Impressionists as clearly as his fondness for using a mirror in his compositions.[22] The rectangle of the mirror breaks the surface of the wall in practically the same way as an open window. Compositions containing open windows, so beloved of the Romantics, are easily understood. An open window leads the eye into the depths, giving added impetus to the view, while a mirror seems to cast the eye back into the space behind the viewer. The viewer feels himself to be not in front of the scene, but inside it. It takes some time to comprehend the relative positions of all the elements in the composition: those reflected in the mirror and thus behind the viewer, and those which are beside the mirror and hence facing the viewer.
A human presence is sensed in Bonnard’s still lifes even when they contain no human figure. But the most important detail of the Moscow still life is the fact that the mirror – in the centre of the composition, and also its brightest spot – reflects the model and the artist’s wife unconcernedly drinking her coffee. Thus this still life does not merely represent various toilet paraphernalia, but tells the viewer something about the artist, whose studio and living-room were one and whose creative activity was more than just a job of work. The mirror is an age-old element of the vanitas type of still life traditionally linked with the motif of a nude figure. Bonnard, however, did not attempt to build up an allegory. The mirror gave him an opportunity to correlate the details reflected in it (his wife Marthe, the cup in her hand, the model) with the various articles on the washstand. With this diversity of details, colour gains a special significance. Soft, muted tones predominate. On the back of the picture Bonnard wrote: “Do not varnish”. The matt effect is very important in this picture. Without it the expressive range of bluish-grey tones would have lost its wonderful subtlety and richness. It is colour that ennobles articles in Bonnard’s still life. Natanson recollected that Bonnard took great delight in watching reflections in a mirror as it, “like him, gave its caress to objects”.[23]
Pierre Bonnard, Misia, 1908. Oil on canvas, 145 × 114 cm, Fondaçion Coleccion Thessen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Henri Matisse, The Red Room, 1908. Oil on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Hermitage, St Petersburg.
The Moscow still life belongs to a series of ten pictures painted by Bonnard over a span of eight years. In the first two canvases – Girl Drying Herself and The Toilette (1907, Private Collection; D 473, 477) – the most important elements are the nude figures, while the dressing-table and mirror serve merely as a background. In the next picture, Nude against the Light (1908, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), Bonnard depicted a young girl looking at herself in a mirror with its “Japanese” frame already familiar from the Moscow still life, and the composition is more complicated. The painting may with equal justification be regarded as “a nude” or “an interior”, since the details of the room are more than merely a background for the figure. Together with the girl, they form part of a colourful spectacle. Comparing this picture with the Mirror in the Dressing-Room, one can understand why Bonnard painted the latter in greyish-blue colours. In Nude against the Light a window is seen in the middle, while in Mirror, where the same room is depicted, the window takes up only a narrow strip of the picture. Consequently all the objects in the first still life, the table and the wall with the mirror, are seen in backlighting. A further development along these lines may be observed in The Toilette (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, D 486), which may be viewed as a preliminary version of the Moscow still life. Here Bonnard draws even closer to a still life free of the former limitations of the genre. In 1909, 1913 and 1914 Bonnard again returned to the mirror motif. In the Dressing-Table with a Bunch of Red and Yellow Flowers (1913, D 772) the size and the basic features of the composition are the same as in the Mirror in the Dressing-Room, but the colour scheme determined by the inclusion of the flowers is different. The next composition, The Toilette (1914, Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts), is no longer a still life but a pure interior with the same dressing-table. However, the window next to it has gone.
Depicting objects which were always at hand or turning to outdoor scenes, Bonnard did not strive to recapture an immediate impression. As a rule, he started working on his painting only when such impressions had taken root in his mind and passed through the filter of the artist’s memory. Feeling no obligation to reproduce an object of his observation precisely, he included in his pictures only that aspect of it which could be subordinated to the imperatives of art. In this way he made every area of his canvases rich in texture and colour.
Pierre Bonnard, Child Eating Cherries, 1895. Oil on board, 52 × 41 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
Pablo Picasso, Composition with a Skull, 1907. Oil on canvas, 115 × 88 cm, Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1909–1910. Oil on canvas, 260 × 391 cm, Hermitage, St Petersburg.
The impact Bonnard’s works have on the viewer does not rest solely on his ability to reveal the most painterly aspect of an ordinary object, but also on the hidden metaphorical and universal meaning of the colours he used. For this reason Bonnard never tired
A. Terrasse,
R. Cogniat,
Th. Natanson,