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拍品专文
In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Bonnard rented the first in a succession of studios at the foot of bohemian Montmartre, in “a rather seedy district”—so he wrote to his mother—centered on the Place de Clichy. The quotidian spectacle that unfolded on these unpretentious streets provided the artist with seemingly inexhaustible subject matter for more than a decade, into the opening years of the new century. On his ritual early-morning walks, Bonnard was constantly alert to the shock of an image—to fugitive sensations, momentary encounters, and unexpected incidents glimpsed in passing that sparked his impulse to begin a canvas. “It was in the metropolis,” Timothy Hyman has written, “that he first developed the faculty of passive attention, of waiting for that sudden welling-up of excited recognition, when a spatial arrangement locks perfectly into place, and a situation becomes an image” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 46).
In the present canvas, Bonnard adopted an elevated vantage point, looking frontally across the bustling Boulevard des Batignolles onto a familiar urban panorama of narrow, six-story apartment buildings with small shops on the ground floor. The flat façades rise parallel to the edges of the composition like a theatrical backdrop, while the horizontal bands of the street and sidewalk function as a shallow proscenium in the foreground. Within this stable geometric schema, rendered in a unified symphony of gray tones, Bonnard captured the myriad moments of anecdotal interest that comprise the subjective experience of the city street, here viewed on an overcast day in winter. An apron-clad woman at the far left pushes a cart full of bright, hothouse flowers; a cyclist leans forward over his handlebars, attempting to catch up with a horse-drawn carriage; two dogs circle one another in an expression of mutual interest, as muffled pedestrians scurry by unaware.
Bonnard’s conception of pictorial space as a stage dates back to the early 1890s, at the height of his involvement with the Nabi group, when he joined his colleague Édouard Vuillard in designing sets for Symbolist theater productions and experimental puppet shows. By the turn of the century, when he painted the present scene, he had begun to seek ways of reconciling the highly decorative art form favored by the Nabis with the immediacy of direct experience—“the theater of the everyday,” as he described it. The seemingly casual cropping of this composition, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the new technology of the Kodak snapshot, conveys all the freshness and informality of the first glance, while simultaneously reinforcing the underlying grid-like structure of the image. Like a detail excerpted from a larger whole, the passing procession of figures represents the irregular ebb and flow of city life that cannot be rendered in its entirety—the fragmentation of reality as a definitive tenet of modernism.
“The modest beauty of this small canvas,” John Elderfield has written, “taking pleasure in the down-at-heel ordinariness of the scene, makes it as extraordinarily fascinating as silently forgetting the passing of time while looking out of a window—which indubitably is how it was painted. And the feeling experienced in the looking, not only in the features of the scene, is conveyed in the painting, in the melancholic tinge to the transitory liveliness depicted down there on the street” (op. cit., 2015, p. 42).
In the present canvas, Bonnard adopted an elevated vantage point, looking frontally across the bustling Boulevard des Batignolles onto a familiar urban panorama of narrow, six-story apartment buildings with small shops on the ground floor. The flat façades rise parallel to the edges of the composition like a theatrical backdrop, while the horizontal bands of the street and sidewalk function as a shallow proscenium in the foreground. Within this stable geometric schema, rendered in a unified symphony of gray tones, Bonnard captured the myriad moments of anecdotal interest that comprise the subjective experience of the city street, here viewed on an overcast day in winter. An apron-clad woman at the far left pushes a cart full of bright, hothouse flowers; a cyclist leans forward over his handlebars, attempting to catch up with a horse-drawn carriage; two dogs circle one another in an expression of mutual interest, as muffled pedestrians scurry by unaware.
Bonnard’s conception of pictorial space as a stage dates back to the early 1890s, at the height of his involvement with the Nabi group, when he joined his colleague Édouard Vuillard in designing sets for Symbolist theater productions and experimental puppet shows. By the turn of the century, when he painted the present scene, he had begun to seek ways of reconciling the highly decorative art form favored by the Nabis with the immediacy of direct experience—“the theater of the everyday,” as he described it. The seemingly casual cropping of this composition, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the new technology of the Kodak snapshot, conveys all the freshness and informality of the first glance, while simultaneously reinforcing the underlying grid-like structure of the image. Like a detail excerpted from a larger whole, the passing procession of figures represents the irregular ebb and flow of city life that cannot be rendered in its entirety—the fragmentation of reality as a definitive tenet of modernism.
“The modest beauty of this small canvas,” John Elderfield has written, “taking pleasure in the down-at-heel ordinariness of the scene, makes it as extraordinarily fascinating as silently forgetting the passing of time while looking out of a window—which indubitably is how it was painted. And the feeling experienced in the looking, not only in the features of the scene, is conveyed in the painting, in the melancholic tinge to the transitory liveliness depicted down there on the street” (op. cit., 2015, p. 42).