Approaching Pierre Bonnard through The Nabis: Reflecting on ‘artistic groups’.

Monday, 23 Jul 2018, 09:30
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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Monday, 23 Jul 2018, 16:09

Approaching Pierre Bonnard through The Nabis: Reflecting on ‘artistic groups’.

I want to find a way of thinking about this topic and I’d welcome input from elsewhere. As I read up on Bonnard (not as much as I’d like – these books are so expensive), I’m developing more of a sense of the incredible differences of representative quality, one attuned to ‘interiors’ of different sorts, that Bonnard introduced to painting. This may be, in part, a benefit of his isolation from mainstream traditions and the genius worship that forefront Matisse and Picasso studies in their different ways. It is clear that the Nabi group and the ‘Intimism’ movement (the latter may be no more than Bonnard and Vuillard in practice) synthesised, each in different ways, innovative practices in the representation of layered kinds of interiority. But that is for another blog!

As for the Nabis, even an old reliable source (like Frèches-Thory & Terrasse 1990) shows that this group was in part short-lived because it could provide too little conceptual dynamism to its front-runners as long as it limited itself to a few precepts: notably;

the idea of the inescapability of flat 2-dimensional imagery in easel painting, and;
compositional values that asserted unity.

These precepts latter could not endure long as the starting point for the Nabi movement. In as far as the movement relied on the cultural borrowing named japonisme, it became increasingly clear that that this source had limitations, especially in the representation of multiple perspectives in a dramatic or theatrical moment.

The Nabis developed large mural and decorative works that had to learn from the multiple focus of Chinese scrollwork and even preferred ‘primitive’ pre-Raphaelite models in re-asserting the value of the diptych and triptych screen – if on a domestic rather than sacral altarpiece level.

There were also political splits amongst Nabis – the sinister one for instance between Latin and Semite Nabis, a source for the later much more significant marking of anti-Semitism debates in art that culminated in the Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfus parties. Bonnard was of the former I’m glad to say.

According to Frèches-Thory & Terrasse (199012ff.), the key spark of the Nabis (a word from the Jewish tradition – Nebiim – meaning ‘prophets’) was, adding to the Japonisme, launched by the 1868 Meiji restoration in Japan, the implied innovations in one important work by Gauguin who was considered the mainspring of Nabiism – the God almost of whom Nabis were prophets. The painting that sparked this perception was The Vision After the Sermon (1888).

Because there is too much to reflect upon, I’m using this blog to look at features of Gauguin’s wonderful painting that led to early Nabi practice, although many of these were later over-turned in the best post-Nabi art of Bonnard and Vuillard.

Though the canvas is a compositional whole, it invites nevertheless compartmentalisation of its sections, using classic devices to perform the sectionalisation, such as the diagonal tilt of a tree trunk and the use of accidental colour – the black and white of Breton costume, as frames. I believe these devices were the source of Bonnard’s interests in door, window, mirror, picture and other framing devices. Separate frames contain semi-discrete elements which reflect on each other formally and in meaning. In the Gauguin, this is shown in the almost satiric mirroring of the dancing cow and the four-legged creature formed by Jacob in full bodily contact with an angel.
Perceptual tricks. The interesting play of the legs in the pair of wrestling males is mirrored in Gauguin’s ‘Children Wrestling’.

The focus in ‘Children Wrestling’ is on the perceptual melding of bodies where the viewer struggles initially to find which leg belongs to which combatant – I find this of interest in the iconography of Jacob even in Byzantine examples.
The use of delineated figures using repeated shapes that emphasise both regularity and freer irregularity.
Distortion in rendering suggestive figures, objects and icons – trees and cows which are liminal for instance between nature and art (as angels are anyway liminal). And the priest, on the right, is liminal with Gauguin himself, as if often pointed out.
The use of ‘unnatural’ colour to insist on such distortion in the interest of art (and perhaps expression) rather than nature.

This is as far as I’ve got. Can anyone help?

Frèches-Thory, C. & Terrasse, A. (1990) The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard and their circle Paris, Flammarion

Steve

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