Oregon daily emerald., June 21, 1973, Page 12, Image 12

Enticed
by
the
small
works
of
Pierre
Bonnard
1925. The large group of drawings dating from that year show that the
artist had acquired something that he could not lose again, something
that consists of an artistic language, a kind of sign system that allowed
him to simultaneously give factual information about phenomenal
reality and remain aware of and give form to an idea, an organizing
artistic intelligence within the work.
Over a decade before, Picasso and Braque had begun to move
away from phenomenal reality toward what could only be termed a
concentration on that organizing intelligence in their Cubist work.
Matisse and the Fauves, though they paid more attention to the forms
of their subject matter, felt free to play with color in what many felt
at the time to be a capricious and equally distortive manner. Bonnard
could not bring himself to take part in such radical movements. The
sense of continuity that emerges from his drawing in this show must
have been quite important to the artist himself. The change that came
about in his art was more an outgrowth of the process of doing it than
the result of certain conscious decisions and reliance on experimental
technique.
There can be no doubt that the conservative attitude Bonnard
adopted in his development as an artist was right for him. The
rest of the drawings in this exhibit attest to the fruitfulness of the
approach he adopted from the 1920s on. In the next two decades, the
artist refined his visual shorthand into a remarkable tool. Sometimes,
as in “Bay of Cannes (Esterel),” the result is highly explicit in its
representation of a landscape or still-life. Sometimes the subject,
especially in the seascape drawings which are sometimes hardly more
than a horizon line and a few squiggles representing clouds, is reduced
to almost nothing. These latter drawings are the more amazing
because the artist evokes from his tangled scribbling an intensely real
sense of what he sees.
The personality that comes through to the viewer in the whole
series of drawings is that of an unheroic but persistent and un
pretentious man who has had a subtle and lasting influence on the art
of our century'. These drawings reveal a little-known aspect of his
genius
The Museum of Art has added another attraction to its present
program, which will run through July 1: an exhibit of photographs and
related material celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of
Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Though of little artistic in
terest. the exhibit succeeds in giving some idea of the environment in
which Copernicus lived and worked toward the end of the Middle Ages.
For those who wish to take an intermission from the drawing show, it’s
an admirable diversion
Stephen Bangs
The drawings by French Post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard,
presently on view at the University Museum of Art (12 to 5 afternoons
except Mondays), are, in the modesty of their scale and sense of
personality, a welcome change for the community. It is a pleasure to
feel enticed by these small works rather than overwhelmed by huge
paintings and sculpture.
Then too. there are the mixed pleasures of feeling in touch with
modem art history. Bonnard being a figure of undeniable in
ternational stature. The sense of history is central in establishing the
importance of the drawings.too, for without the reputation Bonnard
established with his paintings, these little sketches might seem in
significant indeed. For they are not virtuoso performances, and are
meant in most cases to be seen by no one but the artist. Bonnard drew
for himself alone, to keep in touch with what he considered his original
vision Paradoxically, this process of “note-taking” yielded some
remarkably attractive results, as a careful study of these small pieces
will reveal.
Bonnard's early drawings are evidence of the work of a talent
struggling to find its element, its way of translating the raw material
of perception through a coherent artistic vision. More often than not,
in the last decade of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th.
Bonnard failed in that effort His drawing is accomplished, but it
never seems quite comfortable with itself. Often he will turn to other
sources in interpreting what he sees; there is evidence of this in works
such as “Daphnis and Chloe” of about 1902, which seems to owe much
of the density and voluptuous plumpness of its central figure to Renoir,
with whom the artist was acquainted. Similarly, a sinuous “Nude” of
about the same time is reminiscent of Chagall Sometimes he looks
ahead to the concerns of his mature style, as in “Omnibus Horses” of
1895. in which he is clearly concerned with the framing edge of the
drawing, apparently imitating not another artist in this case, but the
indifferent cropping effect of the photograph
About the time of WW I. Bonnard reportedly suffered a period of
doubt about his painting and the direction in which his interest in color
had been leading him. He felt the color had “seduced” him away from
equally important elements of painting, and in order to deal with this
problem. he sought to return to his original vision by concentrating cm
drawing. Though he drew intensively during these years, there is
comparatively little in the show to give an idea of what specifically he
was struggling with and what kinds of solutions he found to his dif
ficulties. Considering that the exhibit is drawn from two private
collections in England, the spottiness that allows such gap6 in a
representation of the artist’s development is understandable, but the
omission is unfortunate nonetheless.
The sense of maturity and self-possession that is detectable in
these drawings fairly emanates from everything Bonnard did after