Stop and Look: Nu à contre-jour by Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard’s place in art history is as a founding member of the group of painters and designers who came together in the late 1880s under the grand and rather confusing name of “Les Nabis“. The word, taken from Hebrew, meant “prophets”, and some of them thought of themselves as bringing something philosophically or even spiritually significant to the art they practised – a frequent occurrence among artists of that period. But what they excelled in was combining patterns of colour and light in essentially decorative ways. Like many of their contemporaries they were much influenced by the bold compositions and simplifications of Japanese art. Of them all, Bonnard was least given to conceptual abstractions, but painted what he saw around him, with a sensuous delight in its actuality.
His predilection for interior scenes is combined here with his love of indirect and diffused lighting. The intimacy of the subject is somehow embodied in his brushwork, a nervous, rippling rhythm that pervades the picture. Despite its cool unemotional title, the picture is something more than the objective study of an effect of light, of a nude in a bedroom: this is almost a portrait, or at least a character study. Here is a woman relishing her own body, which the artist (her husband indeed) delights in observing in all its shapely warmth and physicality. She regards herself in a mirror while spraying herself with scent, and as she sprinkles her body, so his brush seems to scatter an aroma about the whole space, with its lace curtains, patterned wallpaper and mat, and the coolly metallic basin in which she’s just been bathing herself.
Marthe Bonnard (born Maria Boursin) was in fact a woman addicted to personal cleanliness, and spent much of her time grooming and pampering herself – rituals that her husband recorded in numerous pictures. No woman, perhaps, has been more often painted in the bath, though she followed in the tradition of the many studies of women attending to their toilette in the output of Edgar Degas. Degas’s concern was with the movement of the body in action – he was famously a student of ballet dancers rehearsing or performing – while Bonnard is happy to let Marthe’s relaxed, unathletic if shapely form adopt its own quiet rhythms. Here, under the influence of her self-admiration, she seems almost energetic.
That energy is transferred, via the “spraying” rhythms of the brush I that I’ve mentioned, to the space which derives its definition from the light, the “contre-jour” effect of dark forms against brightness. And this, when we think about it, typifies much of our visual experience in our own homes. Bonnard inherited from the Impressionists a fascination with this homely, day-to-day illumination, which is, after all, a defining element in our most frequent views of the world: familiar, but far from ordinary, and worthy of the subtle attention these artists paid it. Bonnard is the least assuming, the most domesticated, as it were, of all his generation, and his work is much loved for that very reason.
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