Steve_Bamlett_blog

The CC Land Pierre Bonnard exhibition Tate Modern visited 03/05/2019

I felt a lot of fear visiting here. The over-crowding was evident and disturbing and definitely detracted from an experience that was otherwise worthy of being waited for – to see some of the most intriguing and wonderful paintings of the twentieth-century for yourself. So one feared that the experience would be dulled (as I had experienced it somewhat the day before in the Van Gogh and Britain exhibition). In fact Bonnard won through.

These paintings are about the act of seeing as a constructive act – one that in truth is entirely non-representational- because it validates not the object seen but the memory of rather more holistic experiences in which objects struggle to find definite place. I’m not sure that I see any more that is commonly seen and commentated upon but that I see it at all seems a miracle. For me, the Dining Room, Vernon (c.1925) says a lot but let’s linger first on the issue of the hard-to-realise object. Various people linger on the miracle of the reflected face in the lower left window frame of the open door, an object so numinous and lost in both reflective light and transparency that it is entirely strange to anything other than an enforced act of comprehension. What matters in Bonnard is not what we see but how we frame vision – hence his interest in framing – and differing levels of transparency in framing. We see through an open door through the enclosure of an open window that obstructs the openness of the door. External worlds through glass view with ones merely framed. Light and colour are projected out from and onto objects such that they defy the boundary-making on which objects (whether glass jugs containing water or tablecloth or wall surfaces.

See these interferences and interactions of thing with their media of construction and perception once and you see it everywhere. For indeed perception is construction and vice-versa. The paint layers – often highly finished and in this so unlike Van Gogh – refuse to belong to one or the other so that Bonnard wants us not to know how representation in paint or everyday to the eye differ. They all live in the uncertainties of the fact that things aren’t there until reconstruct and frame their thereness perceptually and the same is true of memory.

And the most complex objects in Bonnard aren’t only self-reflections, as in Man and Woman (1900) and those haunting late self-portraits of his reflection in a bathroom mirror, but even the very ordinary, such as a pile of books and an unfinished piece of graphic or text on a table facing a window shimmer with strangeness. The act of seeing is very incomplete (The Window 1925).