Pierre Bonnard - The Colour of Memory review: confounding, courageous and utterly captivating

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Ben Luke22 January 2019

At first, I was a little disappointed. The early rooms felt pokey, with none of the breathtaking set pieces of last year’s Picasso exhibition. Some paintings seemed tepid, the Bonnards you find in provincial French museums.

But then, I started looking. And looking. And I was hooked. What a strange and wonderful painter Pierre Bonnard is. He’s often mistaken today, just as he was at the time of a 1933 exhibition in Paris, as a “painter of happiness”. But, as Bonnard responded at the time, “he who sings is not always happy”.

And while many of these paintings are blessed with extraordinary sonorousness and luminosity, their mood is often ambiguous. They can be awkward, betraying a struggle, shot through with the residue of doubt. No wonder Picasso, a painter of such bravura and certainty, dismissed Bonnard’s work as “a potpourri of indecision”.

Matisse, however, an artist wracked with anxiety in his pursuit of harmony, saw his friend as “one of the greatest painters”. For Picasso, Bonnard was a remnant of an impressionist past; this show asserts that he’s a major modern painter.Time and again, I’m struck by how courageous and experimental he was.

His colour combinations are confounding yet thrilling, his surfaces uneven and restless. His compositions repeatedly break rules: heads appear in the bottom corner of the canvas, figures are glimpsed or bisected, as in Nude in an Interior (c1935), or caught in shadow against the light. Cats and dogs lurk like ghosts, objects are scattered haphazardly across surfaces. These are paintings based on observation yet conjured from memory. They hit you with colour but reveal themselves slowly; drawing you in, unfolding in time, captivating and dazzling.

Until May 6

Exhibitions to look forward to in 2019

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