Bonnard and the Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch

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      Natanson’s printed reminiscences of Bonnard give perhaps one of the best pen-portraits of the artist. “Bonnard, when I first met him, was a gaunt young man who sometimes stooped. He had very white slightly protruding front teeth, was timid and short-sighted. His dark brown rather thin side-whiskers curled slightly; perched on his nose, very close to his eyes with the dark pupils, was a small pince-nez in an iron frame, as was the fashion at the close of the nineteenth century. He spoke little, but was always ready to show the portrait of his fat grandmother in whose house he lived when he first came to Paris. The portrait had been painted in the Dauphiné and depicted the old lady with several white hens pecking at some feed close to her skirts. My new friend behaved in a very guarded manner when it came to discussing theories in painting, but he readily spoke about Japanese prints of which he was very fond. At that time such a taste could be easily satisfied. He also preferred checked fabrics far more than any other kind. His smile, with his white teeth showing slightly, was so winning that you wanted to see it again and to hold on to it. You wanted to catch the moment when it appeared. Bonnard smiled out of politeness, because of his shyness, but once he had tamed his smile, so to speak, he was no longer inhibited, and it was as if a tensioned spring had unwound… Bonnard hardly changed from the early days of our friendship. He rarely livened up, even more rarely expressed his mind openly, avoiding any possible chance of letting his feelings come out into the open.”[4]

      “He was the humorist among us,” Lugné-Poë recalled. “His light-hearted jollity and wit can be seen in his canvases”.[5] “Wonderfully gifted, but too intelligent to let us feel his superiority, he was able to hide the spark of genius within him,”[6] was Verkade’s recollection of him. Bonnard’s humour was perhaps not always taken as harmless. The Russian artist Alexander Benois said that his acquaintance with the painter in the late 1890s was short-lived because Bonnard’s specifically French esprit gouailleur (mocking wit) made him feel ill at ease.[7] But Benois’s reaction is exceptional. There was nothing of the born joker about Bonnard, and as he grew older he became increasingly reserved, even somewhat distrustful of others. In fact, throughout his life, even when he was a member of the Nabi group, he required the company of others less than his own; or rather what he needed was to be left alone with his art. Natanson was right when he said that Bonnard’s misanthropy sprang from his innate kindness.[8] But even in his youth Bonnard was probably a more complex personality than he seemed to his friends. His reserve and reticence hid traits which one could hardly suspect. In his self-portrait painted in 1889 (Private Collection, Paris) we see not a light-minded wit, but a watchful, diffident young man. The still eyes hide thoughts one СКАЧАТЬ