Bonnard, the Work of Art: Suspending Time (review)

Bonnard, the Work of Art: Suspending Time is the English version of the catalogue of the exhibition that marked the 2006 reopening of the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. It is a sumptuously produced publication featuring eighty-nine full-page colour plates, reproductions of drawings and photographs by Bonnard, and a selection of photographs of the painter, including several of Cartier-Bresson's celebrated Le Cannet images. The textual sections divide into three parts: an introduction by the curator Suzanne Pagé; a series of essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Sarah Whitfield, Georges Roque, Jacqueline Munck, François Michaud and Michel Frizot; a catalogue of the exhibition including — in addition to the commentaries on exhibited works, chronology, bibliography and technical notes — recollections and interviews with Cartier-Bresson, the model Dina Vierny and the painters Karel Appel, John Armleder, Peter Doig and Guiseppe Penone and short texts on various topics (his 'Bathers', the Sert and Morozov commissions, involvement with La Revue blanche, relations with the Hahnlosers and Duncan Philips, similarities with Proust, the physical evolution of the paintings). As an introduction to Bonnard's work, the catalogue provides a good deal of information and usefully locates its claims regarding the painter's modernity within ongoing critical and artistic debate about his status within the history of art. Whitfield offers a lucid overview of the history of Bonnard's reception and draws attention to the ways in which his own conduct (his forging of his wife's will, his self-effacement, his prolific productivity) and the commentaries of those close to him (in particular, Thadée Natanson and Charles Terrasse) inadvertently contributed to his critical marginalization. Munck examines some of the points of contact and divergence in the work of Bonnard, Monet and Degas, while Michaud and Frizot consider the drawings and photographs. Bois suggests a potentially very productive reading that explains the many discontinuities and illegible passages within the works as part of an, albeit unconscious, phenomenological artistic enterprise Of the essays, Roque's close reading of five key works from different stages of Bonnard's career is the most rigorously organized and offers a coherent assessment of his development that identifies Bonnard's principal interest as 'painting as paint'. The catalogue commentaries focus on the analysis of composition and facture and avoid both the effusiveness and the biographical speculation that has typified certain strands of criticism on Bonnard, but their brevity prevents them from addressing fully the formal complexity of many works. The analytical weight of the textual sections and their engagement with existing scholarship on Bonnard are variable, and the quality of the English expression is erratic. However, my main criticism relates to the volume's disjointedness. While the diversity of the textual sections suggests a laudable ambition to incorporate a range of approaches, these heterogeneous materials do not quite add up to a coherent whole, and there is little sense of a dialogue among the constituent parts. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, one would hope that the more analytically robust essays will help to persuade at least some sceptics of the importance of Bonnard's place in twentieth-century art.