Bonnard's Other Avant Garde

BOnnaRD’S OthER AVant GARDE “The brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile.” Pierre Cabanis, 18th century French physiologist. BY JULIE HEFFERNAN Angela Dufresne, Strangers When We Met Gay Bar, 2010, oil on canvas, 4.5’ x 9.’ Courtesy of the artist. Press your forehead close to someone else’s: a single eye will float tion of the adventures of the optic nerve.”1 John Elderfield enlarged forth and the nose will dislocate in a decidedly Cubist way. Press on that idea by suggesting that Bonnard replaced “artificial per- your eyelids while facing light and you will see geometric patterns spective with the record of natural vision,”2 essentially document- of bright sparks like Op Art. We all know that we can manipulate ing the processes of seeing with his “stews of multitudinous colors what we see and that that ability forms a part of our visual knowl- scrubbed and burnished into low value contrast.”3 But Bonnard’s edge of the world. Learning to notice more of the myriad peculiari- vision was a lot more than just optical. ties of perception and formalizing them with tools and concepts Picasso famously described Bonnard’s unique way of breaking constitutes the methodology of art making. Those who can com- up form into many thousands of color marks as mere “daubing,” municate something expressive of the unique particulars of their but that approach to synthesizing vision has been influential to own visual experience and connect it to others—those people are a number of important contemporary artists like, for example, artists. Certain great ones, Cézanne and Van Gogh among them, Keltie Ferris and Chris Ofili. Their work also evinces the expe- made work that forges a direct link with viewers in a very spe- rience of interior vision—flashes of color, light and hypnagogic cific way, by re-creating how they themselves actively experienced abundance. But Bonnard’s vision was different. It extended be- the process of looking. The kinds of marks they made—their dots yond the optical or perceptual into the very nature of thought and dabs, precise erasures, the way they rubbed and overlaid their itself, as the brain seeks meaning, finds patterns and creates colors—all those things provide viewers a virtual transcription of associations out of random experience. Bonnard’s psychologi- the lived experience they had with their painted motifs—whether cal astuteness, aligned with formal inventiveness, played out in cypress trees or peaches in a bowl—as viewed in the moment, es- compositions that unfold layer upon layer of sensory knowl- sentially allowing us to see through their eyes as though we are neu- edge. That’s what made him a great painter. rologically linked to them. Much has been written about Bonnard’s Bonnard was a quiet artist who worked consistently in the fray exquisite mechanisms for notating his world stemming from his while other modernists were running pitched battles, attacking the oft-quoted observation that painting was, for him, “the transcrip- very core of how we conceive of form and style. Yet I would claim 30 ARTPULSE l www.artpulsemagazine.com Pierre Bonnard, The Palm, 1926, oil on canvas, 147 x 114.3 cm. Philips Collection, Washington DC, USA. Source: http://www. wikiart.org. that Bonnard incited a revolution too, involving an elaboration of air anticipate Bonnard’s flickering marks. Masaccio gave us hu- what permissible content can be. Bonnard’s was a revolution in man sorrow, but Velázquez was one of the first artists to paint subject matter, turning a dining room table into a phantasmagoric so convincingly the vulnerability inherent in social position: his carnival and a woman at her toilette into a primal spectacle, and Infantas—with their natty wigs, mirroring in shape their royal that makes him as important to contemporary painters as Cubists gowns, that function as psychological tropes for the burdens of were to previous generations. Bonnard rejected Cubism’s stylistic wealth, power and position—look more like fashion victims today imperatives partly because they did not serve his desire to insinuate than royalty. Bonnard’s The Boxer (1931) expresses a similar pa- content directly into the viewer’s lived experience. He understood thos. Differences in technique aside, the squall of paint is similar intuitively how to construct, say, a sensory double for our love of a in both artists, overwhelming any sense of authority in Bonnard’s warm bath. I‘ve written about his use of a menstrual rag in Large supposedly strong male figure, as he succumbs to the storm of Yellow Nude, and continue to admire the audacity of presenting mark-making. This too is an image of feckless posturing: “I got to the public an item of such utter interiority that no other painter, carried away with color and I sacrificed form to it,” Bonnard ad- to my knowledge, has ever depicted. That was a form of bravura mitted. The pose trumps the man and undoes him. too—albeit slyer than the swagger of Cubism’s multiple perspec- Bonnard’s dissolution of form foreshadows American visionary tives or Expressionism’s collisions of color. Those gestures, once so artists like Charles Birchfield, and later Informel movements in ab- daring, are now as comfortable to look at as an armchair. stract art. And I see distinct nods to Bonnard in some of the most New eras bring the need for new forerunners, whose underval- interesting figurative artists today, whether they know or acknowl- ued innovations and insights make greater sense in light of a new edge it. I’m thinking for instance of Peter Doig, Angela Dufresne, Zeitgeist. Contemporary artists often search out older artists who Nicole Eisenman, Lisa Sanditz and Hernan Bas. Bonnard’s tangled might provide them with alternative ways of conceiving pictorial gardens and thick air are evident in the eccentricities of Sanditz’s worlds for the next wave of picture-making and conceptualizing. and Doig’s phantasmagoric landscapes; his disappearing figures The Chicago Imagists, for example, while descended from Abstract rematerialize similarly in Dufresne’s and Doron Langberg’s paint- Expressionism and Minimalism, rediscovered the sinuous eccen- ings. His color palette and contrasting light have clearly influenced tricities of the Sienese School to better express the social changes Dana Schutz and Kyle Coniglio. And echoes of the awkward revela- of the 1960s. They were looking for fresh imagery and figurative tions and sudden apparitions in his group portraits resound in the styles that deviated from conventional Old Master painting while bathetic dinner parties of Nicole Eisenman. still engaging with abstraction and narrative, and found those qual- Bonnard anticipates the narrative urgency of such contemporary ities in the likes of Giovanni Di Paolo and Taddeo Gaddi. painters, all of whom have distinct stories to tell about gender fluid- I would describe Bonnard as a bridge artist—one who connects ity, repression, suburban anomie, the stultification of the individual to the past and anticipates the future. His work can be seen in and depredation of the landscape by mainstream consumer culture. the lineage of Piero della Francesca, who shares his appreciation His empathy for women stuck in stifling domesticity, the way he for geometry and taut compositional matrices, and of Diego Ve- understood the repressive nature of bourgeois life, is evident in the lázquez, whose self-conscious subjects and impressions of pulsing way he composed The White Interior (1932) with its awkwardly 31 Kyle Coniglio, Self Portrait with Bears, Otters and Wolves, 2009, oil on canvas, 20” x 24.” Courtesy of the artist. Lisa Sanditz, Underwear City, 2008, oil on canvas, 68” x 87.” Courtesy of the artist. 32 ARTPULSE l www.artpulsemagazine.com bent-over woman, hemmed in by background walls, radiator and paint, but all look to be drowning in the penetrating goo of toxic door. That woman is further cornered, almost pierced, by a fore- color, as though the very poison in the pigments that painters use ground table that virtually juts into her stomach. is contributing to the character’s suffocation. Only the paper lan- Bonnard had an approach to the figure that mirrored his and terns are left behind as witnesses. wife Marthe’s reclusive natures: he famously shaved his moustache Kyle Coniglio is a young artist very much influenced by Bon- when he went on a cruise, “to look like other passengers”4. His nard and Dufresne, and his work evinces a similar interest in illicit figures disappear into their worlds, as though their relative impor- characters that dematerialize in climates of thick air. In Me and the tance to any situation were up for grabs. Vuillard’s bourgeois fig- Beasts (2010) Coniglio paints himself surrounded by a variety of ures blend into their domestic realms; they’re part of the furniture beasts—bears, wolves, otters—all permeated by a melancholic tur- like Betty Draper in Mad Men. But Bonnard’s are caught up in a quoise glow that suggests subterranean malaise, both heartbreak- game of hide-and-seek; they literally sneak up on you, from behind ing and comic. This is a demi-monde for les enfants sauvages, to a tree or bush. Similarly many of Dufresne’s figures belong more to prance and cavort in their bestial play. the atmosphere that permeates her worlds than they do to them- Bonnard insinuates his fascination with the bathetic and illicit selves: they emerge from tiny glowing TV sets, as in Me in TV in subtle, sometimes barely perceptible ways—he was too well- and on the Couch (2007), or fade into a fog of air, as in Strangers mannered to do otherwise. Yet manners don’t concern contem- When We Met Gay Bar (2010), fully aware that they are bit players porary painters, who often lay bare sexuality of the kind seen in in coruscating worlds, where light, the energy of metal music and Large Yellow Nude without hesitation.

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