A Shimmer Of Hints

By ROBERT HUGHES

We are looking into a sort of sea cave, shining with internal color. Its walls are covered with a wobbly grid of large tiles: yellow, viridian, mauve-flecked with rose madder. The floor is all sea-green and turquoise speckles, but it's hard to say exactly what color any patch of the gelatinous mosaic is because each is so modified by contrasting touches within its small boundaries. The biggest shape in this aquarium light rises diagonally across the picture: a bath, like an immense open oyster, in which floats the body of a woman, all legs, shining indistinctly in the water. She seems in a trance--her face can't be read as a face but more as a spongy clump of jeweled paint. She is as indifferent as coral, not posing but tenderly spied on.

Pierre Bonnard is looking at his wife in the bath for the zillionth time. He will finish the picture in 1946, the year before his death at age 80. By then his wife Marthe, who was only two years younger than he, will have been dead for four years. But he is still imagining and painting her with the body of a 30-year-old. No wonder the bath in which she floats, or is embalmed, has reminded writers of a coffin.

The current Bonnard show at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which includes this painting and some 80 others, is a compressed version of a larger affair organized last year by art historian Sarah Whitfield at the Tate Gallery in London, and although it suffers somewhat from the absence of some paintings and omits his drawings and early poster designs altogether, the absence is tolerable. What matters is to have Bonnard in view again. He's one of those modernist masters who seem to keep slipping in and out of focus, not unlike some of the objects in his paintings. He doesn't have the commanding presence in modern art history that Picasso or Matisse has, though in some ways he was as great a painter. Each generation has to discover him for itself, and each time he's a surprise.

Bonnard's critics--including Picasso, who dismissed his art as "a potpourri of indecision"--have often made the mistake of treating Bonnard as a mere hedonist, with his beautiful color and apparent lack of conceptual underpinning. In this they have been wrong. There was nothing stupid or foolishly pleasurable about Bonnard's work. But Whitfield is right to see Bonnard as an elegiac artist: "He is not a painter of pleasure. He is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure."

Bonnard began his career as a member of a young dissident group called the Nabis, or Prophets, that had formed in 1889 in Paris. They believed in taking art down to its essential flat patches of color, strong boundaries, tapestry-like abutments of form and a general emphasis on the decorative. Their prototypes came from Japanese prints and the influence of Paul Gauguin. And they had close ties to Symbolism. Their literary god was the poet Stephane Mallarme, who had conceived of poetry as a structure of words and absences: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence." This was very close to the effect of Bonnard's still lifes and interiors, with their incessant qualification of color within color; their exquisite play of large, vague shapes and smaller, intensely worked ones; and their sense of the instability of perception.

Like his artistic ancestor Chardin or his fellow Nabi Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard was an Intimist. He cared nothing for heroic or historical themes. He had no public life, and his diary was filled not with reflections on art, life or politics but with pencil sketches and occasional notes on the weather. Nor did art theory, avidly debated among some of his painter friends, interest him much.

His subject was private life, its coziness and order, its covert gestures, its moments of deep-rooted habit and occasionally fragile intimacy, in which the artist is both agent and voyeur. He took this domestic introversion to an extreme--the world of work, for instance, is so thoroughly excluded from his paintings that he didn't even depict his own studio. His world was bounded by the bathroom, the breakfast room, the bedroom and the overgrown garden, its disorder of jasmine, honeysuckle and wisteria as exotically suffused with color as Fiji, though glimpsed through French windows.

There is nothing slack about the apparent softness of his interiors and still lifes, like the great Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, 1930-31. The light shifts and shimmers, and some of the objects on the table are drowned in it. Here is a jug, there a cup, there a brioche--but what is that oval yellowish object on the right of the tabletop? Forms sink against the light, and at first you hardly even see the ailing Marthe in her housecoat at the left edge of the painting, timidly holding her cup. Yet, as so often happens with Bonnard, under the ambiguous surface lies a rigorous structure. He jotted in his diary a reminder to seek "big forms, even in small formats." His still lifes, in particular, are marvels of marking and disposition, suffused with a beaming warmth that was the signature of Bonnard's memory at work.

He said he liked having all his subjects to hand. Among these, in the 1890s, were members of his family: his father (a civil servant in the Ministry of War), his maternal grandmother, his sister and her husband, their children. The main presence in his work, however, was the woman he lived with for almost 30 years before they wed in 1925, Maria Boursin, who called herself Marthe de Meligny. She appears in some 380 of his paintings, naked or clothed. His pictures don't narrate their relationship, but they do plot it as a series of presences and apparitions and hints.

At first she is very naked indeed. Even today, a century later, his image of Indolence, 1898, carries a terrific sexual charge--young Marthe sprawled on her side of the big bed, a coarse grin of satisfaction on her round face, her left foot scratching the inside of her right thigh like a cat. Sometimes she poses like an orthodox model--The Bathroom, 1908, where she seems transfigured by the wormy quivering of light and transparency that prevails in the room, is such an image. Sometimes Bonnard unobtrusively reuses the pose of a classical sculpture in rendering her body: the Medici Venus in Large Yellow Nude, 1931, or the Louvre's Hermaphrodite in Siesta, 1900. Quite often you have to look for her; she is on the margin of the painting or sunk in the background, as though half glimpsed, less immediately present to the eye than the blaze of light on a tablecloth. Intimacy, to Bonnard, also meant distance.

The rumpled emptiness of the rest of the bed in Indolence declares that "Bonnard was here," but in the future Bonnard's presence in his own work would be elusive. You can see his hands sticking into the foreground of Large Yellow Nude, holding something unidentifiable--perhaps a crumpled sheet of paper. He appears reflected in mirrors across the room a few times. There are some anxious-looking self-portraits, the artist seeing himself in the bathroom in the morning, scrawny and sad; they are as piercing as the best of Giacometti. The most mysterious of them is Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror, finished in 1946, the year before his death: a mild, bald creature of completely indeterminable age, who might be a shorn 30-year-old human or a space alien. What he is thinking, one cannot even begin to guess.