Yesterday, we renewed our membership at the Phillips Gallery. Actually, “renewed” is not the right word, because there has been a lapse. The polite young lady at the admission desk looked us up and saw that we had let our membership lapse in 2004. This was probably about the year she was born. She asked for certain information. While our address had not changed, she had my old office telephone number, and no email address. “There probably wasn’t email back then”, she offered. At any rate, we are now up to date.

The occasion yesterday was our going to look at the museum’s large exhibit of the work of Pierre Bonnard. According to Wikipedia, Bonnard painted 242 works of art. According to the Phillips, the exhibit has 58 of them. Not bad.

I really knew very little about Bonnard. The last exhibit of his work at the Phillips was (ready for this?) twenty years ago, in 2004, the year our membership lapsed. Did we go to the 2004 Bonnard exhibit and say “Meh”? Or was this the first major exhibit at the gallery after we let it lapse? This is probably something that we will never know (or think about again).

I should say that today, after spending an hour or so with him yesterday, I am not a Bonnard fan, although I understand him better than I did. Let’s see. He was French, and it seems that everything he painted was set in France. Either in Paris, or somewhere in the South where he had a home overlooking Cannes, or elsewhere on the Riviera. He was sort of an impressionist, and sort of not (i.e., he seemed to like fuzzy lines and paintings that look a bit unfinished, but – at least to me – he didn’t have the skill of a, say, Monet). He used a variety of colors, and was able to capture light, and sunlight, through his use of color.

I don’t think he was particularly imaginative. He painted pretty much what he saw. Landscapes out the windows of wherever he was, or landscapes a short walk from his house. Scenes of bedrooms and bathrooms, and coffee drinking. His wife Marthe, over and over again, clothed and unclothed, youngish and oldish. He had an, again to me, annoying habit of painting a landscape and then throwing a face of his wife in for good measure. Or throwing in his dog. Or his wife and his dog.

I always throw Bonnard in with another French painter, whom I think I like better, Edouard Vuillard. I am sure I have a good reason to do that. But there are other artists whom I have never paired with Bonnard. One of those is Henri Matisse. If you asked me before yesterday, I would have told you that Bonnard was older than Matisse by, say, 20 years?

But, no. Bonnard was born in 1867, and Matisse in 1869. Bonnard died in 1947, Matisse in 1954. They were contemporaries. They were friends. And what I noticed even before I checked the dates is that their work had a lot of similarity, largely I think because of their use of color, and of large areas of color within the scenes they were painting.

Now, having said that, I think that Matisse (who I also think a bit overrated, although his art is often more appealing to me that Bonnard’s) had a much broader range. He didn’t stick to what he saw outside his window or in his bathroom. But the structure and the use of color were similar, even if Bonnard’s lines were fuzzy, where Matisse’s were more precisely drawn.

At any rate, it was nice to see the exhibit (and by the way, the curators did quite a job bringing together pieces from many, many museums and collections, and their placing of the work by subject, rather than by chronology, was interesting). I did learn something.

I will leave you with a few examples of his work which I thought were some of the best.