Figures in Rooms, Rooms with Figures

Peter Campbell

• Bonnard by Timothy Hyman
  Thames and Hudson, 224 pp, £7.95, February 1998, ISBN 0 500 20310 5
• Bonnard by Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield
  Tate Gallery, 272 pp, £35.00, June 1998, ISBN 1 85437 243 2

We all love Bonnard now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre Bonnard. Is he a Great Painter?’ Cahiers d’art asked at the time of his death in 1947. They decided he wasn’t and that only those whose taste was confined to the facile and pleasing would say he was. Nor was he much regarded in America, where a definition of the Modern was being worked out that would exclude him. He was Picasso’s ‘pet aversion’; Françoise Gilot records some of the things Picasso said: ‘That’s not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve ... The result is a pot-pourri of indecision.’