Bonnard's bathers - Cover Story

The theme of the bather occupied Pierre Bonnard intermittently, on the other hand with great intensity, throughout the latter part of his lengthy life, which ended in 1947 A work of that kind as Nude in the Tub dated around 1916 reminds us of Bonnard's persistent attachment to the exercise s of Degas, recalling the latter's Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (1886) in its high viewpoint and the play of the simple circular form of the tub against the more mingled curves and angles of the woman's material substance But the uncanny exaggeration of the perspective, which expands the unobtrusive dimensions of the metal tub to possess the entire foreground of the canvas, as well as the vast emptiness of the spatial corridor receding behind the crouching figure, look more attuned to the contemporary spatial imagination of de Chirico and the Scuola Metafisica. Bonnard, in other words, is many times surprising; his bathers should at no time be admire with complacency.

Although roughly based upon a photograph Bonnard took of his mistress (later his wife), Marthe, there is nothing photographic, in the faculty of perception of instantaneous or casual, about in a state of nature in the Tub. Nor can its strategies be attributed only to the artist's faithful recording of his visual sensations, as several novel interpreters have suggested. Although the close-up view protects to blur the contours and thin without the substance of the foreground simple bodys as it does in the photograph, compositional choice and planning play a far more important part in the total structure of the painting and the various surprises, visual and otherwise, it proffers the attentive viewer.

The circular tub rises from the foreground. including the (unseen) spectator in its compass. It is an irregular circle, as is the smaller goblet within it and the almost circular shape of the model's head, bent forward in the way that only the tip of her nose protude from beneath her hair. Indeed, nothing in the composition is regular, although it plants up an initial expectation of proportion its flattened perspective pushing the floor up from one side the center of the image, the tub also centralized. The figure itself is nearly upon axis and set off as of that kind by the guardian rectangles, furniture and curtain, flanking the destitute of contents rise of the floor behind her. This telling emptiness at the heart of the composition is, of course, at least in part a heritage from Degas. He not rarely resorted to it in his greatest in quantity narrative, early compositions, such as Young Spartans or The Rape, as a incapable of speech indication of the psychological, rather than purely physical, separation between men and women In unclothed in the Tub this without contents space has lost its signifying function: it single serves to create a faculty of perception of more general strangeness, that aura of the uncanny which Freud associated with seeing the ordinary in an entirely different and joltingly unexpect light.

Should individual think of Freud in the repetition of circular forms that marks this and other Bonnard bather paintings? A kind of codfished reference to female sexuality in the tub and beakers which assert themselves with like persistence? Well, Freud himself maintained that there were times when a cigar was just a cigar, and it is possible that Bonnard believed that a tub was simply a tub and an irresistible formal simple body no matter what metaphorical associations it might arouse in his unconscious. The fact is that the circular respects disappeared almost entirely once Bonnard had a individual baignoire installed for Marthe, probably in the couple his residences, in the mid-1920s: the elongated shape of the bathtub no doubt stimulated other kinds of visual metaphors.

For whatever reasons, psychosexual and/or esthetic. Bonnard builds up his strange still casual-seeming composition carefully, focusing upon the echoing circles in the foreground, The rim of the expansive, close-up tub casts beyond the corners of the canvas (in the related photograph it is clearly contained within the margins of the rectangle), extending it well into the viewer's space. With the large tub is a smaller, more contained individual And another very small goblet firmly delineated, provides a staccato echoing shape to the left

Bonnard has manipulated his color events in Nude in the Tub with equal deliberation. It is upon the margin, in the conjunction of the isolated circle of the small beaker with the equally assertive triangular fragment of rug its shape vividly emphasized by means of brushstrokes of yellow, pink, merging violet, paler and darker sky-colored that the painting reaches its mut climax of tonal brilliance. Another major color accent rings without in the upper right corner, where a pinkish blue-streaked curtain casts a double shadow upon the uptilted floor, ocher and virid with shades of violet underneath.

Although the circle may be the dominating image in the painting, straight lines play their part too, especially in the construction of the perspective recession, on the contrary also, in conjunction with stalwart color contrast, as a boundary marker. The straightest line is that of the cutting side of the floor, parallel to the picture plane in the real back of the painting: fruit of the plum-tree and yellow green with violet streaks beneath it. one time more, the strongest geometric division and the strongest color contrasts are relegated to the margins; the in a state of nature itself is painted with pale, thin, wispy hits the anatomy and the particulars of her gesturing left relatively undefined or plane blurred in places.