'No other modern artist has ever made paint look quite so unlike itself, so possessed with living qualities.' Andrew Graham-Dixon on Bonnard
The view from the bedroom window of his villa at Le Bosquet, on a summer's day in 1946, was the pretext for one of the smallest and most glowing of Pierre Bonnard's late pictures. The artist looked out, perhaps through eyes half closed against the summer glare, and he saw an orange tree and an almond tree and a thick mass of green and yellow vegetation. He saw the tiles on the roof of a small jerry-built outhouse shining with orange vividness in the heat of the sun. He saw the humid thickness of the air.
But as Bonnard worked on The Little Window (View from the Painter's Bedroom), he did not really paint those things, or not those things alone. He painted the inexplicable intensity of his own feelings before them. His picture offers to the eye an image of the world transfigured. Using paint to create a gold-green sparkle shot through with passages of shadowy blue he made a surrogate for what he saw that seems tinged with the memories of other things seen. He might have been looking down, not across: not through a window at a landscape but through the floor of a glass-bottomed boat at fish and coral, gleaming and twinkling under the sea.
''Bonnard at Le Bosquet'', a lovingly and sparingly selected display of the pictures which the artist painted during the last 20 years of his life at his villa in the South of France, is the most shiningly beautiful exhibition seen at the Hayward Gallery for many years. It is also confirmation that Bonnard was one of the great visionary painters of his century - and, indeed, of...
