A BEAUTIFUL TRAP
PIERRE BONNARD, THE OPEN WINDOW, 1921
(Phillips Collection, Washington)
Bonnard’s Open Window is an invitation to reverie. It is a hot, lazy summer day of a painting, as palpably warm as Monet’s winter scenes are shiveringly cold. Sit back, relax, let your thoughts wander. How can you do anything else in this heat? Here is a room where the walls glow orange like hot coals, a veritable oven of a place. If you touch that patch of wall below the curtain, it will burn you. And the white curtain itself has no cooling effect; against the sweltering orange, all the wintry associations of whiteness are burned away and the curtain looks white hot. Understandably, our eyes don’t linger long in this broiler of a room. We rush toward the large open window, and our visual escape into the window’s green and blue is like leaping into cool water on a 90o day. That band of blue sky is the painting’s relief: coolness, depth and distance combined with transparent lightness. It is a soothing tone, as calm and quiet as a Rothko rectangle. As we look at the painting, that illimitable blue is the focus of our waking dream.
Most first-time viewers concentrate on the orange/blue contrast or that glowing foliage in the window and don’t immediately notice the woman with the cat. In a way this is surprising, because our minimal view of the floor and the angle at which we gaze out the window suggest that we are on the woman’s level, sitting in a chair nearby. Scholars tell us that she is Marthe de Meligny (nee Maria Boursin), Bonnard’s longtime lover, frequent (even obsessive) model and future wife. She is captured here about halfway along the trajectory in Bonnard’s oeuvre that would take her from bedroom to bathroom, from the turn-of-the-century works in which we see her taking off (or putting on) black stockings to the late, haunting masterpieces in which she lies full-length in the bath. The last and most impressive of these, completed a few years after Marthe’s death and now held by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, is one of twentieth-century art’s greatest examples of ‘late’ style. Its gemstone colors and mosaic-like design, as well as the oft-mentioned resemblance of Marthe in the tub to a mummy in a sarcophagus, encourage critics to reach for Egyptian and Byzantine comparisons, but a better analogy can be found closer to Bonnard’s home: the painting is a work of Proustian beauty and complexity, a lapidary remembrance of things past. Two decades earlier in The Open Window Marthe looks much livelier, even though the glowing room has turned her flesh a feverish orange. This is a typical Bonnardian device, a way of harmonizing people and environment that sometimes closely resembles camouflage. Bonnard’s figures have a tendency to become ghostly outlines haunting the borders of his works. Here even the black cat is improbably spangled with orange, and the left side of its body has a ghost-like transparency that creates a blurring effect, as if the animal has been caught in motion by a blinking camera eye.
All the fiery orange on the right side of the painting overwhelms any cooling that might be caused by the dark blue chairback. This rather unexpected patch of blue restates the sky in a darker tone and is part of a complex system of blues and purples across the lower third of the painting–a system that probably serves to make the room look even warmer by contrast. The blue chairback is joined to a blue passage at the bottom of the window frame, and this in turn leads us to the vertical purple stripes under the window. We follow these stripes down to the painting’s lightest blue, a strip of blue-white at the bottom of the wall that collides with the flowerpot’s darker tone only to be restated in the highlight on the side of the pot, as if the light blue glows through the solid mass of the planter and is visible on the other side. The flowerpot curves us back up to the purple stripes that are the most interesting part of this system. The patches of orange between these stripes have the look of fire seen through a grille, and in some places the orange seems to burn through the purple, turning what might have been an orderly geometric pattern into a more irregular progression of alternating thick and thin strips, a few looking almost broken. In Bonnard’s world, color has the power to melt form.
Burn, glow, melt, cool. We need active verbs to describe Bonnard’s colors. His paintings reveal a profound appreciation of color as a form of radiant energy. This is the first of the three truths I find encoded in all of Bonnard’s best works: color is radiant energy; the canvas is a flat surface (like the wall against which Bonnard tacked his canvases for painting, eschewing the easel); paint is gooey, sticky stuff that’s brushed, dragged and scraped across that surface. The first of these is by far the most important. It’s what sets Bonnard apart from, say, Matisse, whose colors, even at their brightest, tend toward an overall harmony. Nothing in Matisse compares with the garish, green-yellow glow of that foliage in the lower window. This light is no reflection of an unseen sun; it emanates directly from the plant, directly from the paint applied thickly to the surface. And this passage remains paint; it doesn’t easily resolve into an identifiable form. Is it part of a tree? the top of a shrub? a vine growing on the wall of the house? It is a construction of downward curving brushstrokes that have a viscous, melting quality. It is a sign of summer heat, indolence, even decay. The idea of light given off by a decaying thing marks Bonnard as the first colorist of the nuclear age. If color is a form of energy, and all the colors in a painting are built of pigmented matter, then matter is also energy. E=MC2. Bonnard’s colors at their most striking have a strangely radioactive glow.
Nonetheless, the upper half of Bonnard’s window is rather Matissean, and beautifully so. The pinkish glow above the trees passes to that blue sky where we would love to linger, but our reverie is abruptly interrupted by the slashed black line of the blind. Like a cinematic edit, the blind suddenly ‘cuts’ us back into the room. After the sky’s limitless depth, this flat black surface forces us to confront the flatness of the entire interior, how everything seems to bend toward, or lock into, the wall, and how the wall itself seems to move forward, approaching the picture plane. Of the two foreground chairs that might create a greater illusion of space, both are severely cropped and the patterned seat of the left one is tilted upward so that it, too, tends to lie against the picture plane. The window that opens inside at right must stand at an angle to the wall, but it appears to be locked into the same plane as that vertical orange strip beside it. The curtain droops down until it seems almost to touch the cat’s ear, thus locking these two distant forms together. The knob at the top of the woman’s chair seems to penetrate the window frame behind it, while the corner of the opposite chair overlaps the window opening, concealing its lower corner (a sharp corner hidden by a sharp corner, wittily enough). These last two passages and the overall flattening and geometrization of the interior call to mind the compositions of Vermeer. Conceptually, this work might have been impossible without the precedent of Vermeer, his way of finding poetry in the most ordinary things, of elevating seemingly inconsequential moments to an almost transcendent level. Bonnard, with his poetry of the bathroom and the dinner table and the sitting room, may be the most deeply Vermeer-like of modern painters, his great works the most important fruits (luminous ones) of the nineteenth-century French ‘rediscovery’ of the Dutch master.
The flat, interlocking, rectilinear geometry of Bonnard’s interior is opposed to the depth and irregularity of the forms seen outside. In the midst of impeccable order (where even chair and cat are balanced by chair and flowerpot), the window opens onto a lovely disorder. The polarity of outside vs. inside in this work is also one of nature and culture, instinct and intellectuality, wildness and domesticity (to borrow a phrase from the poet Robert Bly). While that ethereal sky provides a soothing release, a kind of oblivion, a space for dreaming, the more chaotic trees are a positive counterforce to all the other forms in the painting. They are a nonhuman form, not the gardens or the parceled and inhabited landscapes we usually see in Bonnard, but simply trees against the sky. Nature above human scale. The trees are a vision of organic disorder that must be contained, disciplined. And if it cannot be brought to order, it can at least be surrounded by order, elaborately framed by a window inside a room inside a picture frame inside a room inside Duncan Phillips’s house inside a city designed by another French proponent of geometric order, Pierre L’Enfant... Something similar on a smaller scale occurs at the white curtain. Here an energetic but indistinct pattern on the curtain (possibly floral, possibly representing birds in flight) is framed and contained by the windowpanes. Only the bottom of the curtain escapes capture, but this is contained within the hot orange wall. All natural energy must be controlled. I suspect that these elaborate multiple frames are a means of controlling the sensual abandon that we can detect in some of Bonnard’s landscapes from around 1920. When the artist leaves the house to paint Balcony at Vernonnet (now at the Musee de Brest) or Normandy Landscape (now in Colmar), the experience of rampant nature seems almost overwhelming, and he creates richly colored canvases that exhibit a freedom bordering on abstraction. Especially in the Normandy work there are passages where the lines that represent tree branches or a fence remind one of the powerful marks slashed across Kandinsky’s abstractions. And even in The Open Window we have seen that the passage at the bottom of the window looks more like an abstract construction of paint than any easily recognizable flora. In nature Bonnard is tempted to abandon himself to pure painting, and in The Open Window he tries to control nature in order to control himself. He even attempts to bring nature inside, into his arena. That’s why the heat of this summer day is more palpably present on the walls of the room than on the trees outside. Bonnard has locked the very heat of summer into his walls.
This tension between control and abandon, compositional rigor and sensual color, informs much of Bonnard’s work, but The Open Window may reflect a related personal element that makes this tension especially important. When the painter conceived and executed this work, there was another woman in his life, an attractive younger woman named Renee Monchaty. Her portrait appears in Bonnard’s sketchbook beside a study of foliage for The Open Window, so we can be reasonably certain that she was on his mind while he worked. Bonnard might have seen Renee as his last chance to change his life (he was past fifty at the time), his last shot at renewal, rejuvenation. She was his green tree, his blue sky, his erotic abandon. But Bonnard must have felt an equally great pull toward order and control, toward the structures he found necessary to art and life, structures intimately associated with Marthe, the presiding goddess of his paintings and his home. The exterior-interior push-pull effect of The Open Window, the way the stifling room leads us outward and upward until the blind brings us back inside and the cycle begins again, may represent Bonnard’s own feeling of being pulled in two directions by his attachments to both Renee and Marthe. I should emphasize that this interpretation is highly speculative. Bonnard was as private as his paintings, and we know virtually nothing of his emotional life. But the power of this painting does seem to lie in the oscillation between inside and outside, control and abandon. Renee Monchaty committed suicide in 1924 and Bonnard and Marthe were married the next year, so it would appear that the painter ultimately chose order and interiority; he chose to remain inside looking out. These events happened a few years after this painting, but there is in The Open Window a sense that the painter has already made his choice. The painting is an invitation to reverie, not escape. It is an inducement to daydreaming. Abandon is out there in the green, and freedom is in the blue above, but the viewer always remains inside, drawn back by blackness into the glowing room. If we identify the viewer with the artist (the work’s first viewer, its original audience), we can begin to appreciate the poignancy of the painting. For Bonnard has painted himself into a vibrantly colored trap. He is in a position from which escape can only be contemplated, not achieved. The orderly, geometrical composition by which the painter sought to control nature has instead become an elaborate prison for himself.