If there’s one thing to be said about Pierre Bonnard, the man liked a good bath. Bonnard’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern provides a few of his bath scenes for the visitor to ponder, and I must say I liked them quite a lot. It’s an odd thing to paint a person taking a bath, but I find it’s one of the few situations where finding a nude person would edge more on the mundane than the erotic. Very Bonnard!
While it’s not mentioned in the text of the gallery, I know Bonnard best as an intimist, and in association with Edouard Vuillard. Both are known for their scenes of domestic life, family, friends, and the home. Marthe Bonnard, Pierre’s eventual wife is the subject of these paintings most often, which makes sense in the context of her unwellness and
tuberculosis. Hydrotherapy was a popular form of medicine at the time, and it may well account for the prevalence of baths in Bonnard’s body of work. Marthe’s baths were a part of their daily lives, particularly near the end of her life, and some of Bonnard’s scenes of her are even painted after her death. This makes me quite sad.
Bonnard’s work towards the end of his life becomes a song of color, memory, and longing. Marthe’s baths become a source of sadness, as her coming demise becomes more and more apparent. Bonnard’s color is a form of remembering, as he so often painted based on his first impression of a scene, and what he felt as a result. He called his use of color “many small lies to create a great truth”. The truth of his sadness is apparent in every color.
For example, when examining “Nude in the Bath”, the portion most shrouded in darkness is that of Marthe’s head, her face unable to be seen. The dark tones bring a melancholy that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent in a brightly colored piece. The yellows and oranges contrast the blues and purples, yet the overwhelming patterns bring about disorder for the viewer’s perspective. The patterns flatten the perspective, and this is common among both Bonnard and Vuillard as intimists. “Nude in the Bath” is captivating.
I can’t shake the feeling that Bonnard was a man who deeply enjoyed his home, and the company he kept. His book, Correspondances, is full of fictional letters to and from his family and friends, and was also on display in the gallery. Several of the letters were from family members already deceased, such as his grandfather, and this gives the work a wistful feeling of loneliness.
Bonnard was a relatively ordinary man, but the exhibition conveyed to me his similarly ordinary pain and unease. This conveyance of very common pain allows Bonnard’s work to infiltrate the viewer’s heart, which sounds quite tacky, but rang true for my own gallery experience. If we all conveyed our daily, private lives through color, they would all look quite different, but the feeling, I suspect, would often be the same.
Art and Glory 