Bonnard's Late Interiors at Met Museum
The exhibition tries to put the case for Bonnard as a modernist master, and not a mere Post-Impressionist working past the due date of the movement. Restricting the show to his late interiors, however, does not help to make the case. The color experiments look interesting, but not innovative; his pictorial language changed little in these paintings from 1927 to the end of his life in 1947. He painted the dining room, the breakfast room, the upstairs bedroom in his house at La Cannet, and the objects in them like a raffia basket of fruits, a vase of flowers, bottles of wine. The one still life that really held my attention was that of a bowl of cherries. And "The Breakfast Room" is noble. But I remember being bowled over by his paintings of the terrace and garden seen elsewhere. At this show I was underwhelmed. I don't understand why one critic called Bonnard "the most abstract of painters." These late interiors seem to me insufficiently abstract. They are conc...