Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pierre Bonnard
French; 19th-century, 20th-century
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
84%
The Cup of Coffee. 1907. Oil on canvas
This painting looks like bad impressionism — almost American with its muddy color and forthright design — until you notice two things about it. First, the way the subject's blouse blends with the background and into her right arm (made all the more surprising by the relative verisimilitude of her left arm). Second, the full frontality of the upturned coffee pot, especially its planar inverted-teardrop opening. There's an affinity between these two things, the woman's torso and the pot's aperture: they're painted with the same clumped strokes and their colors rhyme, such that the superficiality of the teardrop orifice — it is the picture plane — casts onto even the body's most modeled segments the implication of an identity with the literal surface of the canvas. This effect radiates outward from there. All sorts of things that seem to exist in depth are sympathetically yanked forward (the breakfast fruits; the spoon; the morsel at lower right; the background). The curious thing about Bonnard is that it's much less his technique than his conceptualization that causes this: his hand is perfunctory and expressive but ultimately descriptive in the mode of, say, Rubens, but the relation of objects within his arrangement (rather than the particular way any of those objects have been presented through paint) is what ruptures the illusion. This is modernism's aims but not quite its means. It's a faint achievement. (Faint because somewhat equivocal.) (TFS, 2025)
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
80%
The Breakfast. 1922. Oil on canvas
Bonnard's technique lets him get away with massive value shifts in comparatively tiny spans of space. It's like Monet turned up to a pitch, and hardened a little bit, too. Look at the left side of the bridge of the sitter's nose compared to the right; look at the lightness that's hiding all throughout the background's brooding; look at that crop of bright paint (it's almost the same streaky mauves and yellows as are in the dress just below it) poised atop the deep brown of the woman's hair. It's not these quick shifts as such, though, but the way they provide the picture with an all-over sort of unity despite (perhaps because of) its inch-to-inch instability. Look again at the patch of light within the dark of her hair: it rhymes with (but isn't identical to) the dress and the chairback and that rectangle in the upper left corner, and it also calls to the whites and hotter purples that blemish the wall behind her. If there's a portion of the painting's structural integrity that's been sacrificed for this effect — Bonnard can suffer from a plumpness and a lack of oomph in his forms — it's mostly made up for by how alive its surface manages unfailingly to seem. (TFS, 2025)