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Lot Essay
As a young man in turn-of-the-century Paris, Pierre Bonnard enjoyed people-watching. He wandered the streets of his working-class neighborhood, jotting down fleeting impressions in his diary, quick sketches that he would later expand into thoughtful yet enigmatic paintings. Painted in 1901 Les deux fiacres (Boulevard des Batignolles) dates from this period of exploration and observation, a turning point between Bonnard’s early Japonisme phase and his later embrace of stylized, dazzlingly colorful versions of traditional genres like the landscape and the still life. Here, in this moment between exoticism and invention, Bonnard turned his gaze towards the reality of his surroundings and the potential of the past. Unlike his contemporaries, who strived for the new and avant-garde, Bonnard took up the mantle of Impressionism, filtering its possibilities through his unique perspective, which drew on new technologies, multicultural exchange, and his deeply personal experience of observing Paris.
Bonnard’s street scenes stand out within a tradition of painting Paris’s evolving urban environment, a popular subject tackled by artists from Claude Monet to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso to Robert Delaunay. Street views were an integral part of the development of Impressionist and modern French art, as each work expressed something of the artist’s subjective experience, such as Gustave Caillebotte’s famously detached, unemotional style, or Camille Pissarro’s grand, soaring views of the city’s new boulevards. Richard Brettell characterized Bonnard as an “intimist,” explaining that he “portrayed a family-oriented, neighborhood-centered Paris, far from the tourist centers and the big hotels” (The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. xxx). Les deux fiacres illustrates Bonnard’s intimate, familiar views of Paris and his commitment to portraying the city as he experienced it.
In one of his brief diary notes, Bonnard wrote: “The demands and the pleasures of seeing, and its rewards. Crude seeing and intelligent seeing” (quoted in J. Elderfield, Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 34). Les deux fiacres illustrates Bonnard’s interest in these demands of seeing, and the experience of understanding the world in its dizzying totality. He does not give the eye a clear focus or resting area, instead creating “a visual all-overness, an evenness of emphasis and handling” (P. Heron, Bonnard Drawings from 1893-1946, New York, 1972, n.p.). Most of the canvas is defined by movement, from the figure on the far right bending over, perhaps to touch an animal, to the central woman, caught mid-step as she leans towards the carriage, to the remarkable twist of the man’s body on the far left. This sense of animation permeates the composition, beyond the figures to the surface of the street and the far landscape, as Bonnard worked over every inch of the canvas with bold, painterly strokes. “Bonnard wanted his paintings to impart the idea that every inch of the surface has been touched…The integrity of the surface lay in making the process of painting every inch of it visible” (S. Whitfield, exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 25). The honesty of the painting, this self-awareness of its necessary artifice, illustrates the modernity of Bonnard’s approach. Though Bonnard looked backwards to the Impressionists, he utilized the style with a definitively modern flair, incorporating elements of the then-nascent field of snapshot photography.
Bonnard took up photography in the 1890s as an associate of Les Nabis, a group that embraced the artistic potential of the camera. He was a hobbyist who did not directly incorporate photography into his practice, but there are resonances between his photographs and his paintings. Kodak in hand, Bonnard took quick snaps of his family and their surroundings, instinctive images that show his interest in bodies in motion, capturing unguarded moments like the awkward contortions and subtle gestures on display in Les deux fiacres. “[Snapshot] photography is not the making of memories, but a veritable search for lost time…an immediate crystallization of the fluidity of beings” (M. Lesauvage, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 184). The cropping, the lack of a singular focus, the sense of randomness—all of these elements in Les deux fiacres mimic photography, this “immediate crystallization” that creates beauty out of the ordinary motions of daily life.
Bonnard’s street scenes stand out within a tradition of painting Paris’s evolving urban environment, a popular subject tackled by artists from Claude Monet to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso to Robert Delaunay. Street views were an integral part of the development of Impressionist and modern French art, as each work expressed something of the artist’s subjective experience, such as Gustave Caillebotte’s famously detached, unemotional style, or Camille Pissarro’s grand, soaring views of the city’s new boulevards. Richard Brettell characterized Bonnard as an “intimist,” explaining that he “portrayed a family-oriented, neighborhood-centered Paris, far from the tourist centers and the big hotels” (The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1992, p. xxx). Les deux fiacres illustrates Bonnard’s intimate, familiar views of Paris and his commitment to portraying the city as he experienced it.
In one of his brief diary notes, Bonnard wrote: “The demands and the pleasures of seeing, and its rewards. Crude seeing and intelligent seeing” (quoted in J. Elderfield, Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 34). Les deux fiacres illustrates Bonnard’s interest in these demands of seeing, and the experience of understanding the world in its dizzying totality. He does not give the eye a clear focus or resting area, instead creating “a visual all-overness, an evenness of emphasis and handling” (P. Heron, Bonnard Drawings from 1893-1946, New York, 1972, n.p.). Most of the canvas is defined by movement, from the figure on the far right bending over, perhaps to touch an animal, to the central woman, caught mid-step as she leans towards the carriage, to the remarkable twist of the man’s body on the far left. This sense of animation permeates the composition, beyond the figures to the surface of the street and the far landscape, as Bonnard worked over every inch of the canvas with bold, painterly strokes. “Bonnard wanted his paintings to impart the idea that every inch of the surface has been touched…The integrity of the surface lay in making the process of painting every inch of it visible” (S. Whitfield, exh. cat., op. cit., 1998, p. 25). The honesty of the painting, this self-awareness of its necessary artifice, illustrates the modernity of Bonnard’s approach. Though Bonnard looked backwards to the Impressionists, he utilized the style with a definitively modern flair, incorporating elements of the then-nascent field of snapshot photography.
Bonnard took up photography in the 1890s as an associate of Les Nabis, a group that embraced the artistic potential of the camera. He was a hobbyist who did not directly incorporate photography into his practice, but there are resonances between his photographs and his paintings. Kodak in hand, Bonnard took quick snaps of his family and their surroundings, instinctive images that show his interest in bodies in motion, capturing unguarded moments like the awkward contortions and subtle gestures on display in Les deux fiacres. “[Snapshot] photography is not the making of memories, but a veritable search for lost time…an immediate crystallization of the fluidity of beings” (M. Lesauvage, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 184). The cropping, the lack of a singular focus, the sense of randomness—all of these elements in Les deux fiacres mimic photography, this “immediate crystallization” that creates beauty out of the ordinary motions of daily life.