The colourful life of Pierre Bonnard

By Samuel Reilly

In his late seventies, Pierre Bonnard published a curious little book called “Correspondances” (1944). A number of rapidly executed sketches of domestic scenes are presented alongside a series of letters that the artist wrote himself, imagining them to have been sent to him by friends and family members in the 1890s. There is something poignant about how trivial these letters are; with this act of ventriloquism, Bonnard meticulously excavated the most banal details from his own deep past. “My dear child”, a letter from his mother begins, “We’re just waiting for you. All the family is here now cousin Augustine has just arrived…The weather is good and we are spending lovely afternoons in the shade.”

The past never strayed far from Bonnard’s mind, as “The Colour of Memory”, an exhibition of the painter’s work at Tate Modern in London, demonstrates. The show focuses on his career after 1900, when he began to emerge as a master of colour. By this time, he was exhibiting his paintings with the Fauves, a group of artists which included his lifelong friend, Henri Matisse. His most characteristic works, of domestic interiors illuminated by light pouring through an open door or window, combine a Fauvist celebration of raw, primary colour with his own earlier investigations into Japonisme’s flat, decorative style. Picasso once privately dismissed him as a relic of the Impressionists – “at the end of an old idea” – while more forgiving critics concluded that he was the archetypal “painter of happiness”. But unlike the Impressionists, who painted from nature, Bonnard painted almost exclusively from memory, arguing that “the presence of the object” was “a hindrance” to communicating the artist’s original idea.