[Footnote M: _Bonnard_. Par Léon Werth. Paris: Crès. 40 fr.]
In France, where even amateurs of painting enjoy a bit of rhetoric, for
two or three days after the death of Renoir one could not be long in
any of their haunts without being told either that "Renoir est mort et
Matisse est le plus grand peintre de France" or that "Renoir est mort et
Derain," etc. Also, so cosmopolitan is Paris, there were those who would
put in the query: "Et Picasso?" but, as no Frenchman much cares to be
reminded that the man who, since Cézanne, has had the greatest effect on
painting is a Spaniard, this interjection was generally ill-received.
On the other hand, those who queried: "Et Bonnard?" got a sympathetic
hearing always.
M. Léon Werth deals neither in rhetoric nor in orders of merit. Bonnard
is his theme; and on Bonnard he has written thirty-six pages without,
I think, pronouncing the name of one rival, leaving to his readers the
agreeable task of putting the right heads in the way of such blows as
he occasionally lets fly. Of Bonnard he has written with a delicacy of
understanding hardly to be matched in contemporary criticism. He has
sketched exquisitely a temperament, and if he has not told us much about
its fruits, about the pictures of Bonnard that is to say, he can always
refer us to the series of reproductions at the end of the volume.
[Illustration: BONNARD (_Photo: E. Druet_)]
What M. Werth would say to the distinction implied in my last paragraph
I cannot tell; but I am sure it is important. Certainly, behind every
work of art lies a temperament, a mind; and it is this mind that
creates, that causes and conditions the forms and colours of which a
picture consists; nevertheless, what we see are forms and colours, forms
and colours are what move us. Doubtless, M. Werth is right in thinking
that Bonnard paints beautifully because he loves what he paints; but
what Bonnard gives us is something more significant than his feeling
for cups or cats or human beings. He gives us created form with a
significance of its own, to the making of which went his passion and its
object, but which is something quite distinct from both. He gives us a
work of art.
To consider a picture by Vuillard, whose work is often compared with
that of Bonnard, might help us here. Vuillard loves what he paints,
and his pictures are attractive, as often as not, chiefly because they
represent lovely things. A picture by Bonnard, for all its fascinating
overtones, has a life entirely of its own. It is like a flower, which
is beautiful not because it represents, or reminds one of, something
beautiful, but because it is beautiful. A picture by Bonnard escapes
from its subject, and from its author, too. And this is all-important
because it is just this independent life of its own that gives to a work
of art its peculiar character and power. Unluckily, about this detached
life, about a work of art considered as a work of art, there is little
or nothing to be said; so perhaps M. Werth has done well to confine
himself to the task of giving his readers a taste of the quality of an
artist's mind. This task was difficult enough in all conscience; the
mind of Bonnard is subtle, delicate, and creative, and it has needed
subtlety, delicacy, and not a little creative power, to give us even a
glimpse of it.
The first thing one gets from a picture by Bonnard is a sense of
perplexed, delicious colour: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be
flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From
this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and
sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have
realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary
originality and perfect coherence our æsthetic appreciation is at its
height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that
the picture carries a delightful overtone--that it is witty, whimsical,
fantastic.
Such epithets one uses because they are the best that language affords,
hoping that they will not create a false impression. They are literary
terms, and the painting of Bonnard is never literary. Whatever, by
way of overtone, he may reveal of himself is implicit in his forms:
symbolism and caricature are not in his way. You may catch him murmuring
to himself, "That's a funny-looking face"; he will never say "That's the
face of a man whom I expect you to laugh at." If you choose to take his
_Après-Midi Bourgeoise_ (which is not reproduced here) as a sly comment
on family life you may: but anyone who goes to it for the sort of
criticism he would find in the plays of Mr. Shaw or Mr. Barker is, I am
happy to say, doomed to disappointment. What amused Bonnard was not the
implication, social, moral, or political, of the scene, but the scene
itself--the look of the thing. Bonnard never strays outside the world
of visual art. He finds significance in the appearance of things and
converts it into form and colour. With the pompous symbolism of the
grand-mannerist, or the smart symbolism of the caricaturist, or the
half-baked symbolism of the pseudo-philosophical-futuro-dynamitard he
has no truck whatever. His ambition is not to convey, without the aid
of words, certain elementary ideas, unimportant facts, or obvious
sentiments, but to create forms that shall correspond with his intimate
sense of the significance of things. The paraphernalia of symbolism are
nothing to his purpose: what he requires are subtlety of apprehension
and lightness of touch, and these are what he has. So M. Léon Werth
meets people who complain that "Bonnard manque de noblesse."
Bonnard is not noble. A kitten jumping on to the table moves him, not
because he sees in that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of
feminine instability, the spirit of youth or the pathos of the brute
creation, nor yet because it reminds him of pretty things, but because
the sight is charming. He will never be appreciated by people who want
something from art that is not art. But to those who care for the thing
itself his work is peculiarly sympathetic, because it is so thoroughly,
so unmitigatedly that of an artist; and therefore it does not surprise
me that some of them should see in him the appropriate successor to
Renoir. Like Renoir, he loves life as he finds it. He, too, enjoys
intensely those good, familiar things that perhaps only artists can
enjoy to the full--sunshine and flowers, white tables spread beneath
trees, fruits, crockery, leafage, the movements of young animals, the
grace of girls and the amplitude of fat women. Also, he loves intimacy.
He is profoundly French. He reminds one sometimes of Rameau and
sometimes of Ravel, sometimes of Lafontaine and sometimes of Laforgue.
Renoir never reminded anyone of Ravel or Laforgue. Renoir and Bonnard
are not so much alike after all. In fact, both as artists and craftsmen
they are extremely different. Renoir's output was enormous; he painted
with the vast ease of a lyrical giant. His selections and decisions were
instinctive and immediate. He trusted his reactions implicitly. Also,
there is nothing that could possibly be called whimsical, nothing
critical or self-critical, about him. Bonnard, on the other hand, must
be one of the most painstaking artists alive. He comes at beauty by
tortuous ways, artful devices, and elaboration. He allows his vision to
dawn on you by degrees: no one ever guesses at first sight how serious,
how deliberately worked out his compositions are.
There is something Chinese about him; and he is one of those rare
Europeans who have dealt in "imposed" rather than "built-up" design.
Bonnard's pictures grow not as trees; they float as water-lilies.
European pictures, as a rule, spring upwards, masonry-wise, from their
foundations; the design of a picture by Bonnard, like that of many
Chinese pictures and Persian textiles, seems to have been laid on the
canvas as one might lay cautiously on dry grass some infinitely precious
figured gauze. Assuredly, the hand that lets fall these beauties is
as unlike that which, even in the throes of rheumatism, affirmed with
supreme confidence the mastery of Renoir, as the easy accessibility of
our last old master is unlike this shy, fastidious spirit that M. Léon
Werth, by a brilliant stroke of sympathetic intelligence, has contrived
to catch and hold for an instant.
[Illustration: (_Mrs. Jowitt's Collection_) DUNCAN GRANT]