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Beyond The Easel:
Decorative Paintings By Bonnard,
Vuillard, Denis, & Roussel,
1890-1930

February 25-May 16, 2001
Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri: 10:30-4:30 PM;
Tues 10:30-8 PM;
Sat 10-5 PM;
Sun 12-5 PM.

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6110
Telephone: 312/ 443-3600
http://www.artic.edu

Part I

When we think of art, we commonly expect so many things. A few anticipate the earth to move, and heaven to open out; some demand a worldly relevance, a handy crib to current thought, a pocket guide to conduct now in vogue; and, at the ultimate extreme, a larger number even more await and demand pleasure, beauty, with all the creature comforts. Together this underscores a point: expecting art to substitute for religion; or tradition -- an authentic 'sociology' -- or to pace the cutting edge of material technologies, is to deny much, and yet demand far too little in return. At times we think, and even more, we seek a rest within a life-affirming joy: a pleasure of the senses. Art supplies the latter just as well. 'Decorative Paintings ' -- some will protest. Nicholas Watkins, art historian at Leicester University, and authority on Pierre Bonnard, notes in a survey essay for this exhibition's catalogue: "In French, however, the term decoration has a much wider range of associations and, in particular, a long history of being used to indicate painting of the grandest scale and ambition." And, despite a restrictive, faulted prejudice, beauty and pleasure in art have their vital roles.

"Beyond The Easel: Decorative Paintings By Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930" now at The Art Institute of Chicago, until May 16, 2001, offers just that revelation. In part, the Nabis (Hebrew for 'Prophets') were a response to the mechanization, standardization, the dulling of individual sight and sensibilities, as a disquieting new age peaked. Reactions to the age were easiest in words; the strategies of art were in fact far harder to come by. (And even these succumbed to words: beginning with such as Gauguin, Synthetism became 'lettered' into art's Symbolism, just as Dada was later to become theorized into Surrealism -- concepts over art.) "Beyond The Easel" offers fancies of light, color, and form, a sense of fundamental sight prima facie, re-seen and painted by the talented and intelligent for specific patrons and spaces. This exhibition further documents the desire to merge Fine Art with the Applied, to expand beyond the artiste's easel and onto the walls and furnishings of homes: restoring aesthetics to mass culture once again. This art is presented in 16 sections, a paced and comprehensive tracing of work among the Nabis, a nexus of artists who saw their changing age; unchangeable, inherent human needs; and who sought wise reconciliations.

"Beyond The Easel" is an exhibition which presents how these artists came together (their history); and why (their beliefs and goals); what became of that energy (what endures and justifies it all -- their art). This showing brings together specific commissions for noted patrons and locales; works meant to work together as a whole; works never seen since then as entireties.

Nicholas Watkins notes that Les Nabis had precursors: the dissents of John Ruskin, the English Arts and Craft Movement ideals; and there were strong models for inspiration, particularly from the Rococo; and from Japanese art, then new to European artists and influentially in vogue. Japonisme reached even to poster art of the period, and "Beyond The Easel" includes several of Bonnard's posters from the Art Institute of Chicago collections. These complement the visitor's grasp of that milieu.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) is perhaps best known to the casual art public, but Maurice Denis (1870-1943), both artist and a writer about art, is recognized as the most articulate spokesman of Synthetism, Neo-Traditionalism, pre-Symbolism: 'counter-Modernisms' -- the Nabis. It was Maurice Denis who coined what became key insights for many and divergent Modernisms in our recent art:

Remember that a picture -- before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote -- is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Denis further observed:

The emotion -- bitter or sweet, or "literary" as the painters say -- springs from the canvas itself, a plane surface coated with colors. There is no need to interpose the memory of any former sensation (such as that of a subject derived from nature).

And the artist continued to note:

A Byzantine Christ is a symbol; the Jesus of the modern painter, even in the most correctly drawn turban, is merely literary. In the one, the form is expressive; in the other, an imitation of nature wishes to be so.

So much of this prefigures what followed in art's next 100 years. In "Beyond The Easel: Decorative Paintings," the visitor views the retreat from pure Illusionism -- the flat image plane is accepted, embraced as a fundamental 'given.' Art is recognized, no longer as a means but as its own ends: asserted as non-verbal sensing, a language in itself, one uniquely human. The Nabis bypassed both Academic application, and reductive visual experiments in thrall to science and technology. They sought to prevail above the modern -- not concede to it. (For as philosopher Ortega y Gasset stressed, the term 'modern' is derived from the same root as 'mode' -- fashion.)

What was the art that they pursued? And why does it still today draw admirers? This show does dispel a prejudice -- 'decorative' is not just caprice, to be 'added on,' an afterthought. In all these works, what meets the eye is pleasure, but it equally solicits an emotional response The perceived is integral, vital -- 'at the very heart.' Nor need it be superficial. No more than emotions, desires, or ideals.

Pierre Bonnard was greatly admired by Balthus, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, even Roy Lichtenstein... so many moderns. His work is bold in color, with a bright, airy palette; bold in its two-dimensions, a plat -- flatness. He is a painter of sensations: the warmth of summer light; cool fresh shadows; of the visual, almost scents... of sand, fresh leaves, bright, harsh high sunlight, and atmospheric mists. A viewer today finds a mass and weight of air; colors as they're seen, rather than as analysed. And yet... little like the Impressionists, Bonnard, and the Nabis, turned from strict Illusionism: conventional realism. Rather than a science of vision, the artists sought an art of human imagination. Beyond just what one knows, or even sees (what the artists, with requisite talent and training, are prepared to gather in), this art develops the subjective and emotive: what only humans sense, create -- grace, balance, a harmony among components and color. Henri Matisse had later noted it, even within his own art -- placing down one color has a momentum of its own which leads to another color, and to still yet another color, and that until a painting arrives at its completed self. Of these four artists, ultimately, Bonnard remained more painterly. Although he never abandoned a ground in actuality (did not leap to Non-objective art), his later work verges close to abstraction. And some of his foremost achievement was color.

Bonnard's Twilight (or, alternately, Croquet Game: 1892), his three oils in series, Apple Gathering (1895/99), or the later Mediterranean (1911), all display representations greatly reduced to nearly abstract contours; spontaneous brushwork indulged in for its own expressiveness. Bonnard counters a decorative arrangement of compositional elements with a turbulence in working the paint. Van Gogh had learned from this, and made it his own; as did Gauguin, who mixed it with conceptualized and 'literary' intents. But Bonnard does anticipate later explorations of Abstractionism, Analytical and Expressionist. And, as the catalogue for this exhibition itself attests, the American Abstractionists, again in the 1970s, followed it out to audacious extremes.

If Bonnard was more daring and inquisitive in his visual sense, Maurice Denis retained a greater loyalty to design values: a more disciplined, stylized attention to pattern; a greater love of line. However much converted and transformed by the Nabis, Denis was also more self-conscious and aware, as well as quite articulate. His Forest in Spring and Forest in Autumn (both oils on canvas from 1894), reveal a strong, graphic balance of visual elements. But what is most striking is his acute sense of the effects of sunlight, filtered through tree cover, and yet arranged dynamically for decorative effect. In Denis's seven panel "Bing" Frieze (1895), color and contour unite in what strongly recalls much later French Modernist Art Deco. Six of the artist's panels are in this exhibition. The frieze was commissioned as bedroom decor by Siegfried Bing for the inaugural exhibition of his Maison de l'Art Nouveau in 1895. Five in this current exhibition, however, are from a second version (between 1897-99). Only one, Farandole, is an original first version. Denis revised and re-fitted such work to suit new interiors and changed personal circumstances.

"Beyond the Easel" is exhaustively researched and documented; the catalogue is thick and highly expert. The one thing, however, for which it cannot account is personality -- no research or analysis can do that. Emile Zola rightly noted that 'art is nature seen through a temperament.' Seeing the original art, in such abundance and after several trips, gives some feel for the artists' work. Bonnard, increasingly freer in approach, more painterly, seems to inject far more personality into his work. Denis, perhaps more cerebral, more concerned with visual simplification of hue, evasion of tone and modeling, and drawn toward the linear, seems to flee from it and into an almost calculated reduction. Among panels of the "Bing" Frieze, his Sleeping Woman (or Crown of the Betrothal: 1897/99), brings to mind the Scuola metafisica of de Chirico.

The four painters of "Beyond the Easel" rejected academic representation, a passively 'scientific' Modernism, and at the same time pursued an art with which men could live, and which would nourish them. And, whatever the developments in art which followed them, they had numerous admirers and heirs: Aristide Maillol, Art Deco painters, Contemporary Abstractionists, graphic artists and designers, all these studied them. And, until May 16, Chicagoans have an excellent opportunity to see "Beyond The Easel: Decorative Paintings By Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930" The Art Institute of Chicago.

Finis Part I
GO TO PART II

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews are in print and may be ordered through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Maurice Denis is quoted from Artists on Art: from the XIV to the XX Century, compiled and edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (Pantheon Books: 1972), and also in Theories of Modern Art, Ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Un. of California Press: 1968). Also recommended is Bonnard and his Environment with essays by James Thrall Soby, James Elliott, and Monroe Wheeler (Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Art Institute of Chicago: 1964).