Art: The Met: Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

"When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it in blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it's a little pink too,so there's no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision... Painting can't be done that way." -Picasso

The eighty or so works by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) featured at the Metropolitan Museum offer a respectable glimpse at an artist's last decade of work titled, "The Late Interiors" and succeeds relatively well at reappraising Bonnard's reputation. It might well have been the exhibit's slightly confusing layout at the Robert Lehman Wing that took away from Bonnard's overall masterworks, but the attempt at renewing the case for Bonnard's place as a significant modernist of the early twentieth century art scene, was a noble one.

"Purple in the grays, vermilion in the orange, on a cold, fine day." - Bonnard

Bonnard's immensely vivid palette and disturbed perspectival stance calls into mind the contemporary master, Henri Matisse. But unlike the flamboyant and grandiose Matisse, Bonnard was known as a quiet, pensive man-- a character and quality that transcends into his paintings. Though his quotidian themes: scenes of kitchen tables and early breakfast mornings are brought to life through his vibrant bursts of color, there is an unsettling nature about his compositions; a disquietude that Bonnard transmits through the often isolated, motionless objects and his preoccupied subjects. His figures often appear and disappear from the peripheries, only to reappear elsewhere across the room, or fade away and blend into the potpourri of paint. Bonnard's late interiors are true testaments to his immense talent at capturing color, distorting our vision and pushing us to question what we percieve and recognize around us.

Of course, no one can say it better than the New Yorker....