Bonnard... Japonard

My visit to the exhibition Bonnard et le Japon in the Villa Caumont, almost a year ago, left a strange and lasting impression on me. The beautiful setting, in the bright early summer light made the display of the work of the ‘painter of happiness’ all the more striking. Yet although this artist is lauded for his stunningly colourful paintings, his art goes far beyond his choice of colours.

The year of Pierre Bonnard’s birth, 1847, saw the presentation of Japanese art to a Parisian public for the first time during the seventh Universal Exhibition of Art and Industry. Images and prints from the Land of the Rising Sun led to a wave of Japanism in Western art as new aesthetic principles and approaches influenced artists in Europe. From the late 1880s, Bonnard too, turned to Japanese work, finding himself not only inspired by the aesthetics of the ukiyo-e woodcuts, for example, but also the philosophy that underpinned this artistic vision. Part of this philosophical manner of viewing and rendering the world was the consciousness of the ephemeral aspect of life, and the will to contemplate and capture this essence in art.

While Bonnard never visited Japan, one art critic labelled him “the most Japanese of all French painters”. Alongside other artists that he met during his preparatory studies at the Académie Julian and then the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris – namely Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard – Bonnard embraced the Nabi Movement, becoming ‘Le Nabi très Japonard’.

Seeking to renew artistic vision, the Nabis (from the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’ or ‘visionary’) were post-impressionists particularly influenced by Japanese art that favoured a calligraphic style, of fluid lines on a flat surface that largely rejected Western linear perspective based on relief and shadow.

In 1891, Bonnard’s poster France-Champagne - using colour lithography commonly used by Toulouse-Lautrec - caught the critics’ attention, as too did his work, Femmes au Jardin. This success marked a turning point in Bonnard’s life as he finally abandoned the law studies he had previously undertaken, in order to devote himself exclusively to art. A few years later, he went on to meet the woman who would be his main model in life – albeit not his sole muse or love – Marthe. It is she, the largely enigmatic Marthe ‘de Méligny’, who figures in most of his domestic scenes, appearing frequently in nude studies, yet rarely presented face-on, over their fifty-year relationship, ever present yet strangely elusive.

During his artistic career, Bonnard explored and revised the possibilities of colour and composition through his subjects – be they figures, landscapes, intimate interior settings or outdoors, whether in Paris, Normandy or the South of France. This desire to rework and relive his work – often altering and pieces created earlier -became an integral aspect of his artistic approach and his fluid vision of life itself and the creative process. In this respect, his stance resembles that of the ukiyo-e he so admired – ukiyo meaning ‘floating world’ – to the extent that his technique itself underlines the state of impermanence with each alteration.

One of the best examples of that are the four panels that form the Femmes au Jardin, initially started around 1921 but still being revisited some twenty-five years later! A fleeting quality that characterizes Bonnard’s work is also inspired by his interest in photography and his use of a Pocket Kodak to compose and frame his vision.

Yet, photographs enabled him to flee a restrictive representation of the reality of the present moment, not capture it slavishly.

Unlike his friend Monet, Bonnard rejected painting plein air, preferring to note impressions to help him recreate scenes from memory once back in his studio; “Before I start painting, I reflect, I dream”. In this way, an odd static quality in Bonnard’s work is present in both the vivid painting and the black-and-white studies. Colour, nevertheless, remained key to his work, with Bonnard admitting that he “sacrificed form to it almost unconsciously’.

Whilst such vibrancy set in unconventional compositions fills us with wonder and joy, Bonnard himself seemed to dismiss these as signs of jollity and light-heartedness, by remarking; ‘He who sings is not always happy’. Whether this was an allusion to his melancholic nature or not is hard to say but it certainly makes Bonnard’s art even more intriguing and unique.