Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch

      Pierre Bonnard, La Promenade, c. 1900. Oil on canvas, 38 × 31 cm, Private Collection.

      Pierre Bonnard, Woman in the Garden (panel 1, 2, 3, 4), 1891. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 4 panels, 160 × 48 cm each, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      Working on large paintings, Bonnard did not invent a new style. On the whole, his manner remained the same as in his small canvases. True, in these he used simpler, clearer compositions and the overall tonality changed under the influence of the southern lighting. The artist’s sincerity, his deeply personal and poetic vision of reality and his unerring feeling for colour helped him to work on large surfaces with undiminished confidence. Displaying a close affinity to the elderly Monet with his water-lilies series and his great panels for the Orangerie, Bonnard left a noticeable mark in decorative painting, although the path thus mapped out was not followed by succeeding generations of monumental artists.

      The triptych forms, in fact, one picture – a landscape on three sub-frames. At the same time, each canvas is compositionally complete. For this reason each panel requires space around it, “room to breathe”. Bonnard knew that the staircase in Morozov’s mansion for which the triptych was intended had semi-columns and he planned that they would act as spacers within the composition. The semi-columns served both as frames and as functional elements of the scene. The subject of the triptych is a garden with a view of the Mediterranean. The garden is not empty: the central panel features an amusing group of children playing; each of the side panels includes a young woman. Although all the human figures are placed in shadow, the triptych would lose a great deal without these gently graceful, typically Bonnardian women and the funny, restless children. Yet, the landscape is more important here than the human figures, a landscape which is not wild and primordial, but cultivated, a landscape produced by hundreds of years of European civilization nurtured by the Mediterranean.