Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film. And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art. The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot.... The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
Pierre Bonnard's best pictures shimmer with colour, draw you in to daring compositions, hint at intimate domestic secrets or burst with the gorgeous flora of the south of France.
When he was less on form, though, Bonnard could give you depressingly sludgy landscapes and not very interesting still lifes. There's lots that's attractive in Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory at Tate Modern in London, but there's also a fair chunk of work that comes across as a bit nondescript. You can see why he divided opinion -- Matisse thought he was fantastic, Picasso thought he was rubbish -- and why he still does.
This extensive show starts off brightly enough, but a few rooms in, we were getting to feel somewhat underwhelmed by an excess of indistinct views of the green and brown foliage outside Bonnard's window and some rather murky townscapes. There's one picture that has St Tropez looking like the Lake District on a wet weekend. And then, metaphorically speaking, the sun came out.
This is Le Cannet, just north of Cannes, where Bonnard moved in the late 1920s. This panoramic view was at the centre of Bonnard's world for the final two decades of his life, full of the colours and scents of the Mediterranean landscape. And that sums up much of the tone of the second half of the 13-room exhibition; an air of vibrancy, and lightness and brilliant sunlight.
Bonnard, born in 1867, straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We saw him recently in the Courtauld Impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery, seemingly incorporating the last hurrah of Impressionism. But Bonnard wasn't putting down on canvas what he saw; he was painting what he remembered. "The presence of the object," he said, "is a hindrance for the painter when he is painting." He often reworked pictures years later.
This show starts in 1900, and the first painting we encounter is Man and Woman, depicting Bonnard and his lover Marthe de Méligny naked in a bedroom, parading their bohemian spirit for all to see. We get a lot more of Marthe throughout the show, because if there's one thing Bonnard is well-known for, it's naked women in bathrooms or dressing rooms. (Marthe took a lot of baths as treatments for various ailments, though, when out of the bath, she seems to keep her shoes on while otherwise naked a surprising amount of the time.)
In Mirror above a Washstand, Bonnard displays his compositional ingenuity, showing the nude from the back reflected in the mirror, but adding an air of mystery too: Where's the painter, and the observer, in this reflection? It's got a rather untypically grey palette for a Bonnard, and, despite the fact that you're sneaking a surreptitious peek through the looking-glass, it doesn't make you seem quite as much a voyeur as you often do with Bonnard's nudes.
This painting's from Moscow, by the way; the Le Cannet landscape is from Fort Worth, and there are lots of works from private collections among the 100 or so on show. This is not one of those exhibitions where you feel short-changed because the pictures are all very familiar.
This show really takes off when you get to a room filled with work from one year: 1925. In comparison with what's gone before, you get the feeling that Bonnard's palette has lightened and his compositions have become generally more imaginative. A Terrace in the South of France has small figures picked out against a pale yellow wall with strong horizontal lines, topped by dramatic greenery.
There are more daring horizontals in The Bath; the ochre tiles, then the whiteness of the bath, the bluish water in which Marthe is stretched out across the canvas, and then the lower rim of the tub.
Hanging nearby is the even more ambitiously cropped Nude in the Bath. In this one, we're looking at only the bottom half of Marthe's body, toes towards the top. Another figure in a robe, also headless, enters from the left. Even your local painter and decorator hasn't done as many bathrooms as Bonnard, in such infinite variety. He painted Marthe 300 times.
Here's another from the same year, when the two of them married after 30 years together: The Window. Bonnard had a terrific gift for looking through windows and doors, or perhaps that should be remembering what he'd seen through them, or just inside: red roofs, the woman on the iron balcony half obscured by the shutter, a pen and inkpot on the table.
From a decade later, Nude in an Interior from the National Gallery of Art in Washington captures the intriguingly semi-glimpsed intimacy of a moment in the pastel tones that seem to be the hallmarks of late Bonnard; vibrant yellow, pink and pale blue.
There's a perception that with the light and bright colours of these later years, Bonnard was the "painter of happiness". That's a view easily dispelled when you look at his self-portraits, several of which are scattered through the second half of this exhibition. They're dark, sorrowful and anguished. "He who sings is not always happy," Bonnard said.
This picture is from 1938, and World War II was yet to plunge Europe into darkness. During the war years, Bonnard was unable to travel around France as he'd been used to and was largely restricted to Le Cannet. Marthe died of a heart attack in 1942. Some of the very late works capture a sense of that confinement, such as The Sunlit Terrace. The reds, oranges and crimsons are gorgeous, but you're hemmed in by walls on both sides.
Here is the artist, photographed during the war years with one of those dogs that pop up so often in his paintings, sometimes in interiors where they're being fed a morsel from the table.
The Studio with Mimosas shows how Bonnard's work became more abstracted late on while keeping the device of a view out through a window at the landscape and still making use of his accustomed vibrant colour scheme. Like the tree in full bloom, that yellow is overwhelming.
Bonnard's a popular choice for a Tate show, and there was quite a crush when we visited during the first couple of days of the run, even though it was in the middle of the week. But we found the exhibition took a temporary dip after the first couple of rooms; there were some unmemorable pictures to trudge round before things really got going. Maybe Matisse and Picasso were each half right.
Pierre Bonnard, Mirror above a Washstand, 1908, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Pierre Bonnard, The Bath, 1925, Tate.
Pierre Bonnard, The Window, 1925, Tate
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior, c. 1935, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait, c. 1938, Private Collection
André Ostier, Photograph of Pierre Bonnard, 1941. © André Ostier
Pierre Bonnard, The Studio with Mimosas, 1939-46, Musée National d'Art Moderne -- Centre Pompidou. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais
When he was less on form, though, Bonnard could give you depressingly sludgy landscapes and not very interesting still lifes. There's lots that's attractive in Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory at Tate Modern in London, but there's also a fair chunk of work that comes across as a bit nondescript. You can see why he divided opinion -- Matisse thought he was fantastic, Picasso thought he was rubbish -- and why he still does.
This extensive show starts off brightly enough, but a few rooms in, we were getting to feel somewhat underwhelmed by an excess of indistinct views of the green and brown foliage outside Bonnard's window and some rather murky townscapes. There's one picture that has St Tropez looking like the Lake District on a wet weekend. And then, metaphorically speaking, the sun came out.
Bonnard, born in 1867, straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We saw him recently in the Courtauld Impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery, seemingly incorporating the last hurrah of Impressionism. But Bonnard wasn't putting down on canvas what he saw; he was painting what he remembered. "The presence of the object," he said, "is a hindrance for the painter when he is painting." He often reworked pictures years later.
This show starts in 1900, and the first painting we encounter is Man and Woman, depicting Bonnard and his lover Marthe de Méligny naked in a bedroom, parading their bohemian spirit for all to see. We get a lot more of Marthe throughout the show, because if there's one thing Bonnard is well-known for, it's naked women in bathrooms or dressing rooms. (Marthe took a lot of baths as treatments for various ailments, though, when out of the bath, she seems to keep her shoes on while otherwise naked a surprising amount of the time.)
In Mirror above a Washstand, Bonnard displays his compositional ingenuity, showing the nude from the back reflected in the mirror, but adding an air of mystery too: Where's the painter, and the observer, in this reflection? It's got a rather untypically grey palette for a Bonnard, and, despite the fact that you're sneaking a surreptitious peek through the looking-glass, it doesn't make you seem quite as much a voyeur as you often do with Bonnard's nudes.
This show really takes off when you get to a room filled with work from one year: 1925. In comparison with what's gone before, you get the feeling that Bonnard's palette has lightened and his compositions have become generally more imaginative. A Terrace in the South of France has small figures picked out against a pale yellow wall with strong horizontal lines, topped by dramatic greenery.
There are more daring horizontals in The Bath; the ochre tiles, then the whiteness of the bath, the bluish water in which Marthe is stretched out across the canvas, and then the lower rim of the tub.
Here's another from the same year, when the two of them married after 30 years together: The Window. Bonnard had a terrific gift for looking through windows and doors, or perhaps that should be remembering what he'd seen through them, or just inside: red roofs, the woman on the iron balcony half obscured by the shutter, a pen and inkpot on the table.
The Studio with Mimosas shows how Bonnard's work became more abstracted late on while keeping the device of a view out through a window at the landscape and still making use of his accustomed vibrant colour scheme. Like the tree in full bloom, that yellow is overwhelming.
Practicalities
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory is on at Tate Modern on Bankside in London until May 6. Opening hours are daily from 1000 to 1800, extended to 2200 on Fridays and Saturdays. Full-price tickets are £18 and can be booked online here. Blackfriars on the Thameslink cross-London rail line and Southwark on the Jubilee Line Tube are the nearest stations to Tate Modern.
Images
Pierre Bonnard, Landscape at Le Cannet, 1928, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.Pierre Bonnard, Mirror above a Washstand, 1908, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Pierre Bonnard, The Bath, 1925, Tate.
Pierre Bonnard, The Window, 1925, Tate
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior, c. 1935, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait, c. 1938, Private Collection
André Ostier, Photograph of Pierre Bonnard, 1941. © André Ostier
Pierre Bonnard, The Studio with Mimosas, 1939-46, Musée National d'Art Moderne -- Centre Pompidou. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais
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