Exhibition of the week Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 6 May
During his lifetime, the French post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), was highly regarded, said Lucy Scovell on Culture Whisper – Matisse considered him “the greatest of us all”. Yet since then, his voice has been “largely drowned out” by his louder modernist contemporaries. The first major Bonnard exhibition in the UK in 20 years “seeks to redress this oversight”. It brings together about 100 of his “greatest works”, including still lives, landscapes, street scenes and “sensuous images of everyday life”. Mostly spanning the four most rewarding decades of Bonnard’s career, from 1912 to his death, it traces his “bold experimentation with composition and colour, as well as the influence of time and memory on his creative process”. The show reveals a quietly brilliant artist with an “unparalleled ability” to capture “transient, intimate scenes of domestic life”. It will leave you feeling “light-of-step and inspired”.
There are some “gorgeous” paintings here, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Bonnard’s “vibrant images” of gardens, landscapes and domestic interiors (many of which depict his wife and muse, Marthe de Méligny, bathing) “reward long looking”, slowly revealing the intricate colour combinations at which he excelled. He also had an “astonishing” knack for depicting light and texture, effortlessly evoking everything from “wafting grasses” to “peeling woodwork”. Nevertheless, Bonnard was rubbish at painting people, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. The anatomies in works such as the “clunky” Standing Nude (1928) and the “comically awkward” Nude Bending Down (1923) are unconvincing, to say the least. Picasso, for one, apparently “loathed” Bonnard’s paintings – and on the strength of this exhibition, I can see why. “Too many marks. Too many colours. Too little sense of direction.”
I disagree entirely, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. This is a “riveting” show full of magnificent paintings. Highlights include the “painfully frank” Man and Woman (1900), a “lamplit scene” as “bleak as anything in Sickert or Freud”; the “monumental” Summer (1917), a pastoral image peopled with “half-hidden figures”; and an extraordinary series of “frail, hollow-eyed” self-portraits Bonnard painted in the years immediately before his death. Best of all is The Table (1925), a “masterpiece” depicting de Méligny against an “iridescent” white tablecloth groaning with trays and porcelain. Throughout, the work is “delicate, beautiful, light of touch”. Rarely will you see such a “visually ravishing” exhibition.