"Le Nabi Tres Japonard"

“In my youth I was swept off my feet by the marvelous pastiche of colours of Japanese crepons, a sort of paper made from material, very folk-art. Long afterwards I realized the beauty of works by the great Japanese engravers: they were much more subdued, but they taught me less about the relationships between pure colors. " - Pierre Bonnard, from a letter to Hedy Hahnloser, a Swiss art collector.

"I understood … that color could express anything, without needing modeling or [three-dimensional] relief. It seemed to me then that it was possible to translate light, form, and character with nothing more than color." - Pierre Bonnard, from  Shimmering Color by Antoine Terrasse,  Skira, Geneva, 1964)

A shy, myopic law student who yearned to be an artist, Pierre Bonnard said "I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artistic life, with all that I thought it meant in terms of free expression of imagination and freedom to live as one pleased."   According to Antoine Terrasse, what attracted Bonnard to Japanese art was "the importance assigned to the personal factor in the making of a picture, the artist’s right to dispense with nature imitation and to rearrange the data of reality, the images his eye has registered, in a new manner determined by his inner vision."

He was, in the phrase of Gustave Kahn, "tired of the quotidian."  And yet, later in life Bonnard spoke of the Nabis' search for "the connections between art and life."  In contrast with the more symbolically inclined members of the group, Bonnard created fresh versions of ordinary subjects, men and women, children, pets, and life in the streets of Paris.  So Bonnard shared an apartment and studio on the rue de Pigalle with the similarly inclined Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis in the early 1890s.

Bonnard borrowed a Japanese technique of highlighting elements of an image through blocks of color  with what different results in  The False Step and The Peignoir.  The first is simple and clear; the second weaves a patterned background around a patterned dress, pointing toward abstraction.  Bonnard jettisoned European techniques of one-point perspective and three-dimensional shading. but used color to give depth to his works. Bonnard professed disinterest in theories of art, for him painting was ‘the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve’  
 Bonnard’s younger sister Andrée was a musician, and her husband Claude Terrasse, a composer and music teacher. In April 1891 Bonnard visited his sister and brother-in-law at the Villa Bach, in Arcachon, and this work may have been conceived there. We may easily imagine him speaking in an aside with Andrée while he painted, with Claude seated nearby, lost in his own thoughts.

After 1900, as the Nabi wave receded, Bonnard remained the truest to the original intention.  His Little Fauns is  a very decorative version of the French landscape, with a wink and a nod to  the classical in the two little creatures who give the picture its name. The French take classical culture very seriously, but not Bonnard.  As Francois Jourdain wrote: "his little fauns look like urchins from the avenue de Clichy."

Unorthodox in his methods, Bonnard painted directly on rolls of canvas nailed to his studio walls, cutting it into its shape after he finished painting.
Images:
1. The False Step, 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
2. Silhouettes. c. 1890-1893, Collection Bernheim, France.
3. Le Peignoir, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Portrait of Berthe Schaedlin,  1892, private collection, France.
5. Claude Terrasse and Andree Bonnard Terrasse, 1891, National Gallery of Australia.
6. The Little Fauns, 1908, Hermitage Museum, Russia.
7. Normandy Landscape, 1920, Unter-Linden Museum, Colmar, France.