HIDDEN DEPTHS Tate Modern’s retrospective reveals Pierre Bonnard’s wife Marthe as the ever-present, emotional source of his luminous masterpieces
The seductive beauty of Pierre Bonnard’s enigmatic wife and muse ripples through Tate Modern’s new retrospective
Iam standing in a tiny bathroom on the upper level of a modestly sized villa in Le Cannet, a picturesque hillside locale to the north of Cannes. The shutters are thrown open to let in the glorious Mediterranean views – lush foliage set against the dramatic backdrop of the hazy Estérel mountains – and a claw-foot bath takes pride of place on a floor laid with blue-and-white tiles. For a moment, I seem to glimpse the figure of a woman in the bathtub, then I blink and she is gone. ‘I’m trying to do what I have never done – give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing,’ Pierre Bonnard once said of his art. Here at Le Bosquet, the house where he spent the best part of his last two decades, I cannot help but feel his quest is complete. Like his paintings, in which the figures are often partially obscured, the home is full of veiled memories that tell us everything and nothing about an artist we know far less well than we imagine.
Bonnard’s relatively isolated lifestyle in Le Cannet, coupled with the fact that his paintings do not fit neatly into a category such as Impressionism or Modernism, has created something of a critical conundrum when assessing his legacy. Whereas Picasso believed that Bonnard was ‘not really a modern painter [but] a decadent, at the end of an old idea’, Matisse had no hesitation in declaring: ‘Bonnard is a great painter, for today and for the future.’ A new Tate Modern exhibition spanning the latter half of his career, from 1912 to his death in 1947, will make the case that the smallness of the artist’s world was by no means synonymous with a narrow vision; if anything, the more closely he looked at his surroundings, the more their light and colour fired his imagination.
It is true that as the years went by, Bonnard increasingly withdrew from the lively Parisian social circles in which he had begun his career, not least because of the declining physical and mental health of his wife and muse, Marthe de Méligny. From the outset, their love affair was shrouded in mystery: when they met in 1893, Marthe concealed from him her real name, Maria Boursin, her age (she was 24 but claimed to be 16) and many of the details of her family history. After their marriage in 1925, she was regularly beset by bouts of illness, precipitating an obsession with therapeutic bathing that took the couple on countless journeys to spa towns throughout the country. Yet for all that she was Bonnard’s cross to bear, she was also an inexhaustible source of inspiration, her slim, sensual figure a constant suggested presence in his paintings, barely changing with the passage of time. As an artist who chose to work from memory rather than from life, Bonnard found endless fascination in the idea – or ideal – of her youthful body; after all, in his words, ‘my aim isn’t to paint from life, it’s to inject life into painting’.
Like most artists of his age, Bonnard took other lovers or mistresses, most significantly Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle, the wife of his family doctor, and Renée Monchaty, who killed herself shortly after he married Marthe, yet neither seems to have held quite such an enduring allure as his wife, nor inspired such artistic originality. Whereas his portraits of Lucienne and Renée are traditional in their composition, with the sitter looking directly at the painter, Marthe is more likely to appear in our peripheral vision as though observed from a distance, poised on the threshold of a room or busying herself about some task, most commonly her frequent ablutions. Her fondness for ritual cleansing must have inspired Bonnard’s most famous painting, Nude in the Bath (1936), in which she is shown halfsubmerged in the tub, Ophelia-like, the water reflecting ripples of golden and mauve light around the room. One of a number of his masterpieces on display at Tate Modern, not only is the work testament to the artist’s ingenious approach to perspective and sheer mastery of colour, but it also challenges the view that he was simply a painter of happiness. Marthe’s motionless, floating form and the sepulchral aspect of the bathtub convey a certain pathos that exists as an undercurrent in even his most vivid landscapes, with their scattered solitary figures.
Part of this hidden melancholy may come from Bonnard’s own sense of dissatisfaction with his work. A consummate perfectionist who would continually tinker with his paintings, he was in his seventies when he declared his desire to redo everything: ‘I only begin to understand: one ought to start again.’ By then, sadly, he had little time remaining for such an undertaking. Marthe’s death in 1942 affected him deeply – in a letter to Matisse he confessed his ‘grief and solitude’ on losing his companion of half a century – and he himself died five years later.
Something of that poignancy seems to linger in the air at Le Bosquet, where Bonnard’s studio has been preserved exactly as he liked it. Still visible are the holes in the plaster walls, dating from when he would pin up his works-in-progress so that he could retouch them over weeks or even months. Only Marthe’s chamber, which the artist locked on the day of her death, is out of bounds – a mark of respect for a woman who was, and remains, an enigma.
‘The CC Land Exhibition: Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory’ is at Tate Modern (www.tate.org.uk) until 6 May.