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拍品專文
During the opening years of the 20th century, Bonnard painted a series of Parisian cityscapes near his apartment at 65, rue de Douai that portray with droll delight the countless vignettes and chance encounters that comprise the daily experience of the urban street, glimpsed in passing. In the present scene, several people promenade along the sidewalk to the left of the canvas, the quintessential Parisian flâneurs, connoisseurs of the boulevard whose bodies are cropped by the lower edge of the canvas. Two tall trees and a lamppost clearly separate the left side of the canvas from the scene at right, where horses tirelessly draw carriages loaded with cargo and driven by members of the working class. “Bonnard set out to capture in his work what no other painter of his time had observed: the little incidents of Parisian life,” John Rewald wrote. “He descended into the streets and the squares, watching with equal interest people, horses, dogs, and trees. Broad avenues, busy street vendors, and cafés on sidewalks offered him their intricate patterns, their noisy agitation” (Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, pp. 25-26).
Rather than painting from a window looking down over the street, as Camille Pissarro had done in Paris and Rouen since the mid-1890s, Bonnard—an inveterate early-morning walker—here chose a street-level vantage point, positioning himself as an active participant in the bustle of the modern metropolis as well as an astute observer. The neighborhood where he lived and worked was an unpretentious, middle-class quarter at the foot of Montmartre, long frequented by artists and writers; Pablo Picasso lived a block away from May 1901 until January 1902, during his second stay in Paris, and painted the area as well.
The principal theme of the painting, however, is not the topography of the street itself but rather the human spectacle that it encompasses. Instead of plunging into depth like Gustave Caillebotte’s painted thoroughfares, for example, Bonnard’s boulevard bisects the lower edge of the canvas—a shallow stage that the various actors in this informal modern-life drama traverse from side to side. The storefronts and buildings rise in the distance like a theatrical backdrop. “He placed the emphasis on people, not architecture,” Nicholas Watkins has written, “leisurely enjoying the spectacle of their comings and goings. Crowds drift by as in a dream or in a sequence for an early silent film” (Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 93).
By the turn of the century, Bonnard had adopted many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, the broken and visible brushstroke and open-air subject matter. In the present painting, he has used a harmonious palette of muted golden tones, enlivened with patches of red, green and charcoal gray, to evoke the urban milieu under delicate morning sun.
Bonnard, moreover, eschewed the signal Impressionist practice of painting en plein air, instead translating his vision of the city onto canvas from memory in the intimacy of his studio, muffling details to create an atmospheric effect. “The Impressionists, in seizing one moment, thought to capture reality with it—but they were merely capturing its luminous skin,” Jean Clair has explained. “This was very different from Bonnard’s intention, which...consisted in letting himself be imbued with [the subject], only to revive it later on. Then, when the distillation of memory had retained only its finest and most lasting qualities, its light and its odor, it would shine again with all its brightness in the purer air of his memory, giving him the same feeling of bliss as came to Proust who, on stumbling over the uneven stones of the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, imagined himself transported to the Piazza San Marco” (Bonnard, The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 31).
Rather than painting from a window looking down over the street, as Camille Pissarro had done in Paris and Rouen since the mid-1890s, Bonnard—an inveterate early-morning walker—here chose a street-level vantage point, positioning himself as an active participant in the bustle of the modern metropolis as well as an astute observer. The neighborhood where he lived and worked was an unpretentious, middle-class quarter at the foot of Montmartre, long frequented by artists and writers; Pablo Picasso lived a block away from May 1901 until January 1902, during his second stay in Paris, and painted the area as well.
The principal theme of the painting, however, is not the topography of the street itself but rather the human spectacle that it encompasses. Instead of plunging into depth like Gustave Caillebotte’s painted thoroughfares, for example, Bonnard’s boulevard bisects the lower edge of the canvas—a shallow stage that the various actors in this informal modern-life drama traverse from side to side. The storefronts and buildings rise in the distance like a theatrical backdrop. “He placed the emphasis on people, not architecture,” Nicholas Watkins has written, “leisurely enjoying the spectacle of their comings and goings. Crowds drift by as in a dream or in a sequence for an early silent film” (Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 93).
By the turn of the century, Bonnard had adopted many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, the broken and visible brushstroke and open-air subject matter. In the present painting, he has used a harmonious palette of muted golden tones, enlivened with patches of red, green and charcoal gray, to evoke the urban milieu under delicate morning sun.
Bonnard, moreover, eschewed the signal Impressionist practice of painting en plein air, instead translating his vision of the city onto canvas from memory in the intimacy of his studio, muffling details to create an atmospheric effect. “The Impressionists, in seizing one moment, thought to capture reality with it—but they were merely capturing its luminous skin,” Jean Clair has explained. “This was very different from Bonnard’s intention, which...consisted in letting himself be imbued with [the subject], only to revive it later on. Then, when the distillation of memory had retained only its finest and most lasting qualities, its light and its odor, it would shine again with all its brightness in the purer air of his memory, giving him the same feeling of bliss as came to Proust who, on stumbling over the uneven stones of the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, imagined himself transported to the Piazza San Marco” (Bonnard, The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 31).