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Text: Albert Kostenevich

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Albert Kostenevich

BONNARD

and the Nabis

Contents

LIFE

MASTERWORKS

THE NABIS

EDOUARD VUILLARD (1868-1940)

KER XAVIER ROUSSEL (1867-1944)

MAURICE DENIS (1870-1943)

FÉLIX VALLOTTON (1865-1925)

BIOGRAPHIES

PIERRE BONNARD

KER XAVIER ROUSSEL

MAURICE DENIS

EDOUARD VUILLARD

FÉLIX VALLOTTON

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

NOTES

Bonnard around, 1890.

Photo taken by Alfred Natanson.

LIFE

Article by Christian Zervos, Cahiers d’Art, 1947.

Annotated by Matisse, January 1948. Private Collection.

In October 1947, the Musée de l’Orangerie arranged a large posthumous exhibition of Bonnard’s work. Towards the close of the year, an article devoted to this exhibition appeared on the first page of the latest issue of the authoritative periodical Cahiers d’Art. The publisher, Christian Zervos, gave his short article the title “Pierre Bonnard, est-il un grand peintre?” (Is Pierre Bonnard a Great Artist?) In the opening paragraph Zervos remarked on the scope of the exhibition, since previously Bonnard’s work could be judged only from a small number of minor exhibitions. But, he went on, the exhibition had disappointed him: the achievements of this artist were not sufficient for a whole exhibition to be devoted to his work. “Let us not forget that the early years of Bonnard’s career were lit by the wonderful light of Impressionism. In some respects he was the last bearer of that aesthetic. But he was a weak bearer, devoid of great talent. That is hardly surprising. Weak-willed, and insufficiently original, he was unable to give a new impulse to Impressionism, to place a foundation of craftsmanship under its elements, or even to give Impressionism a new twist. Though he was convinced that in art one should not be guided by mere sensations like the Impressionists, he was unable to infuse spiritual values into painting. He knew that the aims of art were no longer those of recreating reality, but he found no strength to create it, as did other artists of his time who were lucky enough to rebel against Impressionism at once. In Bonnard’s works Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline.”[1] It is unlikely that Zervos was guided by any personal animus. He merely acted as the mouthpiece of the avant-garde, with its logic asserting that all the history of modern art consisted of radical movements which succeeded one another, each creating new worlds less and less related to reality. The history of modern art seen as a chronicle of avant-garde movements left little space for Bonnard and other artists of his kind. Bonnard himself never strove to attract attention and kept away altogether from the raging battles of his time. Besides, he usually did not stay in Paris for any length of time and rarely exhibited his work. Of course, not all avant-garde artists shared Zervos’s opinions. Picasso, for example, rated Bonnard’s art highly in contrast to his own admirer Zervos, who had published a complete catalogue of his paintings and drawings. When Matisse set eyes on that issue of Cahiers d’Art, he flew into a rage and wrote in the margin in a bold hand: “Yes! I maintain that Bonnard is a great artist for our time and, naturally, for posterity. Henri Matisse, Jan. 1948.”[2] Matisse was right. By the middle of the century Bonnard’s art was already attracting young artists far more than was the case in, say, the 1920s or in the 1930s. Fame had dealt strangely with Bonnard. He managed to establish his reputation immediately. He never experienced poverty or rejection unlike the leading figures of new painting who were recognized only late in life or posthumously — the usual fate of avant-garde artists in the first half of the twentieth century. The common concept of peintre maudit (the accursed artist), a Bohemian pauper who is not recognized and who readily breaks established standards, does not apply to Bonnard. His paintings sold well. Quite early in his career he found admirers, both artists and collectors. However, they were not numerous. General recognition, much as he deserved it, did not come to him for a considerable time. Why was it that throughout his long life Bonnard failed to attract the public sufficiently? Reasons may be found in his nature and his way of life. Bonnard rarely appeared in public, even avoiding exhibitions. For example, when the Salon d’Automne expressed a desire in 1946 to arrange a large retrospective exhibition of his work, Bonnard responded to this idea in the following way: “A retrospective exhibition? Am I dead then?” Another reason lay in Bonnard’s art itself: not given to striking effects, it did not evoke an immediate response in the viewer. The subtleties of his work called for an enlightened audience. There is one further reason for the public’s cool attitude towards Bonnard. His life was very ordinary; there was nothing in it to attract general interest. In this respect, it could not be compared with the life of Van Gogh, Gauguin or Toulouse-Lautrec. Bonnard’s life was not the stuff legends are made of. And a nice legend is what is needed by the public, which easily creates idols of those to whom it was indifferent or even hostile only the day before. But time does its work. The attitude towards Bonnard’s art has changed noticeably in recent years. The large personal exhibitions which took place in 1984-85 in Paris, Washington, Zurich and Frankfurt-am-Main had considerable success and became important cultural events. What was Pierre Bonnard’s life like? He spent his early youth at Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris. His father was a department head at the War Ministry, and the family hoped that Pierre would follow in his father’s footsteps. His first impulse, born of his background, led him to the Law School, but it very soon began to wane. He started visiting the Académie Julian and later the Ecole des Beaux-Arts more often than the Law School. The cherished dream of every student of the Ecole was the Prix de Rome. Bonnard studied at the Ecole for about a year and left it when he failed to win the coveted prize. His Triumph of Mordecai, a picture on a set subject which he submitted for the competition, was not considered to be serious enough. Bonnard’s career as an artist began in the summer of 1888 with small landscapes painted in a manner which had little in common with the precepts of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. They were executed at Grand-Lemps in the Dauphiné. Bonnard’s friends — Sérusier, Denis, Roussel and Vuillard — thought highly of these works. Made in the environs of Grand-Lemps, the studies were simple and fresh in colour and betrayed a poetic view of nature reminiscent of Corot’s. Dissatisfied with the teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Vuillard continued their education independently. They zealously visited museums. During the first ten years of their friendship, hardly a day went by when they did not see each other.

Pierre Bonnard, The Croquet Game, 1892.

Oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Pierre Bonnard, Andrée Bonnard with her Dogs, 1890.

Oil on canvas, 180 x 80 cm, Private Collection.

Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891.

Lithograph in 3 colours, 78 x 50 cm, Musée de Reims.

Pierre Bonnard, La Revue Blanche, 1894.

Lithograph in 4 colours, 80 x 62 cm,

National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Pierre Bonnard, Portrait of Berthe Schaedlin, 1892.

Oil on cardboard, 31 x 16.5 cm, Galerie Daniel Malingue, Paris.

The Nabis group, assembled by Paul Sérusier, was comprised of several members from the Académie Julian. In refusing to comply with the rules of Impressionism, these artists claimed instead to be largely influenced by Gauguin. Their name, derived from the Hebrew Nahbi, signifies a prophet or a visionary, thus symbolizing their will to discover the sacred nature of writing. They were largely influenced by Japanese art, most notably wood engravings, as well as popular and primitive art and the art of the symbolic artist, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Although they all differed considerably from one another, there were two lines of thought in particular on which they all agreed; firstly, subjective misinterpretation, born within the artist’s emotions accentuating certain aspects of the subject that is being depicted, and secondly, objective misinterpretation ensuring the depiction finds its place in the fundamental order of the work. Their art is characterized by an absence of perspective and the use of pure tones and shades. They would all attempt to overcome the barrier between easel painting and decorative art, experimenting with illustration, wallpaper, stained-glass windows, tapestry, furnishings… The Nabis group united artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Ker Xavier Roussel, Georges Lacombe, the sculptor Aristide Maillol and even Maurice Denis who claimed that, “before a painting is turned into a battle horse, a naked woman, or becomes any sort of trivial detail, it is essentially just a flat surface covered with colors that are assembled in a certain order.”And yet they addressed one another with the formal “vous”, while Bonnard addressed other members of the Nabi group with “tu”.

In the 1890s Bonnard was by no means a recluse. He loved to go for long walks with Roussel, even listened with pleasure to Denis’s lengthy tirades, although he remained rather taciturn himself. He was sociable in the best sense of the word. One of his humorous reminiscent drawings (1910) shows the Place Clichy, the centre of the quarter where young artists, light-hearted and somewhat Bohemian, usually congregated. Bonnard, Vuillard and Roussel are unhurriedly crossing the square. Some distance away, Denis is bustling along with a folder under his arm. Towards them, from the opposite direction, comes Toulouse-Lautrec, swinging a thick walking-stick. Toulouse-Lautrec was well disposed towards Bonnard and Vuillard. From time to time he would take their paintings, hire a carriage and drive to the art-dealers whom he knew personally. It was not easy to get them interested, though. Toulouse-Lautrec greatly admired Bonnard’s poster France-Champagne published in 1891. Bonnard took the artist to his printer, Ancours, in whose shop Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge was printed later the same year followed by his other famous posters. The poster France-Champagne, commissioned by the wine-dealer Debray in 1889 was to play a special role in Bonnard’s life. This work brought him his first emoluments. The sum was miserably small compared with the earnings of the then much feted artist Jean Meissonnier, but it convinced Bonnard that painting could provide him with a living. This small success coincided with failure in his university examinations. Perhaps he was deliberately burning his boats, abandoning a career in business for the sake of art. On 9 March 1891 he wrote to his mother: “I won’t be able to see my poster on the walls just yet. It will only appear at the end of the month. But as I finger the hundred francs in my pocket, I must admit I feel proud”.[3]

Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait, 1889.

Tempera on cardboard, 21.5 x 15.8 cm, Private Collection.

Pierre Bonnard, The Life of the painter,

Pages from a drawing book. Pencil and

fountain pen wash, around 1910. Private Collection.

Pierre Bonnard, The Bridge, 1896-1897.

Lithograph in 4 colours, 27 x 41 cm.

At about the same time he sent five pictures to the Salon des Indépendants. At the close of 1891 he exhibited his works together with Toulouse-Lautrec, Bernard, Anquetin and Denis at Le Barc de Boutteville’s. When a journalist from Echo de Paris, who interviewed the artists at the exhibition, asked Bonnard to name his favourite painters, he declined to do so. He said that he did not belong to any school. His idea was to bring off something of his own and he was trying to forget all that he had been taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

One more event in 1891 played an important role in Bonnard’s life. The journal Revue Blanche moved its editorial office from Brussels to Paris. Bonnard and other members of the Nabi group soon established a good relationship with the publisher Thadée Natanson, another former student of the Lycée Condorcet. Natanson managed to get the most gifted artists, writers and musicians to work for him. The frontispieces of the journal were designed by Bonnard and Vuillard; inside there were the latest poems of Mallarmé, works by Marcel Proust and Strindberg, Oscar Wilde and Maxim Gorky; Debussy also contributed. On the pages of the Revue Blanche literary critics discussed the works of Leo Tolstoy. Natanson himself devoted his first article to Utamaro and Hiroshige. Without exaggeration, the Revue Blanche was the best French cultural periodical of the 1890s. The atmosphere in its editorial office, which the Nabis often visited, was stimulating. Natanson’s personal support for the artists was also of no small importance. He was as young as the artists whom he backed and was not afraid to follow his own inclinations. Even Natanson’s friends later admitted that at times they had doubts whether they could trust a person who decorated his home with works by Bonnard and Vuillard.

Pierre Bonnard, The Little Laundry Girl, 1896.

Lithograph in 5 colours, 30 x 19 cm, Paris, National Library.

Natanson’s printed reminiscences of Bonnard give perhaps one of the best pen-portraits of the artist. “Bonnard, when I first met him, was a gaunt young man who sometimes stooped. He had very white slightly protruding front teeth, was timid and short-sighted. His dark brown rather thin side-whiskers curled slightly; perched on his nose, very close to his eyes with the dark pupils, was a small pince-nez in an iron frame, as was the fashion at the close of the nineteenth century. He spoke little, but was always ready to show the portrait of his fat grandmother in whose house he lived when he first came to Paris. The portrait had been painted in the Dauphiné and depicted the old lady with several white hens pecking at some feed close to her skirts. My new friend behaved in a very guarded manner when it came to discussing theories in painting, but he readily spoke about Japanese prints of which he was very fond. At that time such a taste could be easily satisfied. He also preferred checked fabrics far more than any other kind. His smile, with his white teeth showing slightly, was so winning that you wanted to see it again and to hold on to it. You wanted to catch the moment when it appeared. Bonnard smiled out of politeness, because of his shyness, but once he had tamed his smile, so to speak, he was no longer inhibited, and it was as if a tensioned spring had unwound… Bonnard hardly changed from the early days of our friendship. He rarely livened up, even more rarely expressed his mind openly, avoiding any possible chance of letting his feelings come out into the open.”[4]

“He was the humorist among us,” Lugné-Poë recalled. “His light-hearted jollity and wit can be seen in his canvases”.[5] “Wonderfully gifted, but too intelligent to let us feel his superiority, he was able to hide the spark of genius within him,”[6] was Verkade’s recollection of him. Bonnard’s humour was perhaps not always taken as harmless. The Russian artist Alexander Benois said that his acquaintance with the painter in the late 1890s was short-lived because Bonnard’s specifically French esprit gouailleur (mocking wit) made him feel ill at ease.[7] But Benois’s reaction is exceptional. There was nothing of the born joker about Bonnard, and as he grew older he became increasingly reserved, even somewhat distrustful of others. In fact, throughout his life, even when he was a member of the Nabi group, he required the company of others less than his own; or rather what he needed was to be left alone with his art. Natanson was right when he said that Bonnard’s misanthropy sprang from his innate kindness.[8] But even in his youth Bonnard was probably a more complex personality than he seemed to his friends. His reserve and reticence hid traits which one could hardly suspect. In his self-portrait painted in 1889 (Private Collection, Paris) we see not a light-minded wit, but a watchful, diffident young man. The still eyes hide thoughts one does not usually share with others. His acquaintances saw him as a fine, jolly fellow. And that was true enough. But was that all? With age, other hidden features of his nature became more evident. At thirty, when Benois met him, he was a different man from the one he was at the age of twenty: he was less light-hearted and showed less desire to surprise with paradoxes. So many of his early compositions were deliberately paradoxical.

Pierre Bonnard, The Children’s Lunch, c. 1906.

Oil on wood 27 x 33,5 cm, Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

In 1891 Bonnard told a correspondent from the Echo de Paris that painting should be predominantly decorative, that the disposition of lines revealed true talent. Three or four years later he began to move away from intricate decorative effects and deliberate complexity towards a greater liberation of colour and a living texture in painting, as well as towards its inner integrity. This was a turning point in his career, but it did not occur suddenly. Changes in Bonnard’s painterly manner accumulated gradually, and for this reason it is impossible to draw a dividing line between one period and another. But changes did take place. When looking at a picture executed in the new manner, one cannot help feeling that it is not so much a different picture as the earlier one transformed, but that the newer picture represents a deeper understanding of what the artist was doing before. While developing his talent, Bonnard at the same time remained true to himself. Bonnard’s invariable loyalty to himself and to his views on life is always expressed in his art. Throughout the sixty years of his career he remained true to the subjects of his youth, but none of his works is mere dreary repetition. His artistic individuality is easily recognizable in each new work.

Bonnard’s intonations often have humorous overtones. Benois saw this as the source of the superficiality for which he reproached the artist.[9] There might have been an element of truth in this, if Bonnard’s humour were present in all circumstances. But he used humour only when he wanted to avoid the direct expression of emotions. In a way, his special form of tact was akin to that of Chekhov. Though there was never any personal contact between these two men, they had much in common. Bonnard always added a touch of humour when he depicted children. The ploy reliably protected him against the excessive sentimentality often observed in this genre.

Pierre Bonnard, The Terrasse Family (L’après-midi bourgeoise), 1900.

Oil on canvas, 139 x 212 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Bonnard had no children of his own. For many years he led a bachelor’s life. This seemed not to worry him in the least. If, however, one looks at his works as a kind of diary, a rather different picture emerges. In the 1890s-1900s he often depicted scenes of quiet domestic bliss. These scenes — the feeding of a baby, children bathing, playing or going for walks, a corner of a garden, a cosy interior — are both poignant and amusing. Of course, these aspects of life attracted the other Nabis, too, which was in keeping with the times. But in Bonnard’s work these motifs are not treated with stressed indifference, as in Vallotton’s. Bonnard does not conceal the fact that he finds them attractive. Yet it is not easy to discern a longing for family life in his work. One might suggest it but without much confidence. Bonnard seems to remind himself, as always with humour, that family life is undoubtedly emotionally pleasant, but there is much in it that is monotonous and even absurd — a truly Chekhovian attitude. The many commonplace situations treated on account of banality with a degree of humour are summed up in the monumental portrait of the Terrasse family, a work unprecedented in European art. Bonnard gave the picture the title The Terrasse Family (L’Après-midi bourgeoise). It was painted in 1900 and is now in the Bernheim-Jeune collection in Paris (another version is in the Stuttgart State Gallery). The title parodies Mallarmé’s eclogue L’Après-midi d’un faune. The artist had affection for his characters and not only because they were his relatives (Bonnard’s sister Andrée was married to the composer Claude Terrasse). Yet he depicted the dozen or so of them in an ironical parade of provincial idleness, in all its grandeur and its absurdity.