I have all my subjects to hand, I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.
—-Pierre Bonnard
“One cannot have too much yellow,” said Pierre Bonnard. Yellow, for him, was the color of light—- and he used to warm and enliven landscapes, to complicate interiors, and to saturate spaces and figures with emotional resonance. If Bonnard had a thumbprint, it would be yellow. His layering of brushstrokes to emphasize color paved the way for the great colorists of abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko.
What follows is a few of Bonnard’s yellows organized chronologically, as well as commentary by art critics. The commentary isn’t matched to the painting, but I wanted to leave that tension in between the piece and the possibility so as not to provide a definitive “first reading” for any of these.
Pierre Bonnard, The Port of Cannes (1926-7)
“There is a sense of the picture plane, beginning on the bridge of our nose, much in the way reading glasses change the way we see, resting on the nose, looking over, looking through and looking at our own nose itself. Could it be that Bonnard’s pince-nez triggered this vision? In the in-focus, out-of-focus drawings and paintings of Bonnard, the deep space is flattened, near forms are volumetric, and the negative spaces operate as both flat and spatial simultaneously. All this is made more apparent through the possible subtle use of his eye-glasses shifting positions. It is with a single adjustment of his spectacle frames that he could see, say, a bunch of grapes, flattened and unified, and then, conversely, volumetric and spatial, with the individual grapes revealed, and the apex of the nearest grape to the painter’s eye defined.” (Graham Nickson)
Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait (The Boxer), (1931)
“There is always color, it has yet to become light.” (Bonnard)
Pierre Bonnard, The Workshop with Mimosa (1935)
It’s interesting to contrast this intense warmth with a more pastel-hued glimpse of this painting.
Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room on the Garden (1935)
“The time in the paintings is also deepened by furtive movements and rustlings, mostly thanks to Bonnard’s figures. They often seem to shift about, partly because we can look right at them for a while before we actually see them. Our shock that they have been there all along, or have just arrived, somehow prolongs the painting into an event.” (Roberta Smith)
“It is in the later drawings that we see him using an innovative lexicon of marks, which are made up of loops, squiggles, spirals, dots, dashes, ticks, circles, crosses, zeds and horizontals, diagonals, and vertical variants. These variable marks constitute a language for him to “speak” to the image and color. In the rarest of circumstances, black and white can suggest or imply color. One thinks of certain Van Gogh drawings for example, where the intensity of the black against the white has a color potential. If we look at a lot of Bonnard’s later drawings, the landscapes in particular, we feel the potential of these marks as metaphoric of certain color. Most importantly, the marks held information for Bonnard. The drawings carry form and space, a sense of scale, and of course, image. Bonnard would use an eraser to add to the confection of space opening up forms. Often, the drawings have a density of application and a highly charged intensity of feeling. Nearly always the late drawings have context — that is, a subject of enquiry and its context relative to its environs.” (Graham Nickson)
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior (1935)
Pierre Bonnard, The Garden Steps (1940)
“Working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases tacked directly to the wall, he painted largely from memory with the help of quick sketches and watercolors, burnishing his motifs until they approached incandescence. He said that painting from reality distracted him from the task of making the painting a freestanding entity.” (Roberta Smith)
Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait
“In Self-Portrait (1938-40) the left spectacle lens has a small, very powerful negative shape of light isolated by the frame of the glasses. Bonnard’s eye literally views light in a ying-yang, color-chiaroscuro confrontation. Next to this is a barely perceptible, yet significant, sharp mark of depiction of the spectacle frame’s edge – it is a pencil mark embodied in the paint.” (Graham Nickson)
Pierre Bonnard, The Last Self-Portrait (1944-1945)
“In many works we have a strong feeling that we are ‘in’ the space of the represented image. That nearness is a very strong element in a lot of the work. We are taking tea with Marthe, we are passing the cream to her, we are taking the bread roll from the basket, an apple from the compotier. Even in the self-portrait we are rinsing the safety razor.” (Graham Nickson)
Pierre Bonnard, Picking Cherries (1946)
“I have all my subjects to hand, I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream. “
—-Pierre Bonnard
Addenda and other butterflies to chase . . . The yellows in Bonnard’s late interiors. The relationship between Les Nabis, whom Bonnard helped to cofound, and the yellows. Bonnard on painting and light as glimpsed by an artist wandering through an exhibit.