But Bonnard saves the gambit through an intimacy so absorbed that it becomes un-selfed

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But Bonnard saves the gambit through an intimacy so absorbed that it becomes un-selfed. The viewpoint is clearly his, him standing by the bed looking down, but before him Marthe is lost, in herself and in the sheets that fold her body into their light.There are no more such bedroom scenes after the early 1900s. But the point shouldn't be over-stated: the paintings are not a confessional documentary They don't tell tales. The internal drama of the marriage is conveyed obliquely, and must to an extent be read in.Take the many pictures of Marthe bathing.

One way, they look like variations on an established theme, the "Nude in the Tub", and that's how Bonnard titles them. But evidently it is the same woman, and the same woman who appears clothed in so many of the interiors; and Pierre himself is present in these bath scenes, indicated by an intruding leg, or again just by a viewpoint - the viewpoint of someone who's in the room too, and close by. And when you know that Marthe, due to some mental or physical complaint, spent hours daily in the bath, the repeating subject becomes more than a theme. The bath seems a refuge or a prison, and you wonder if this was a marriage of great convenience for an artist who wanted to paint bathers - or if bath-time got as obsessional for him as it did for her.Criticism of Bonnard's art easily becomes criticism of his marriage, and I don't see that this can or should be avoided, so long as you grant that marriage-criticism is at least as tricky a practice. Naturally the art only gives one side of the relationship (but that's an exemplary role too: all anyone has of their relationships is a one-sided view; how you deal with that one-sidedness is the issue).

And then the paintings, with their saturating colours and sensory plenitude, seem to say it was all bliss, a paradise - while the facts suggest it must have been miserable, or miserably unequal, a sorry sort of shut-away mutual bondage, with her (on some accounts, basically a nutcase) wholly dependent on him, and him a dubious martyr, needing and nursing and using her dependence.What does that do to the pictures? Make their intense plenitude claustrophobic, or the sign of an all-infusing, all-transfiguring love, or a resolutely denying and thriving fantasy? Perhaps rather an intimacy and habituation that can hardly tell the difference between these things Marthe is everywhere, visible and invisible. Bonnard deals in Mary Celeste still-lifes and interiors, which carry a human presence even when there is no person there, and in a kind of picture puzzle - there is a woman concealed in this scene, can you find her? - where Marthe either lurks inconspicuously but insistently, as a dim profile just inside the painting's margin, or is incorporated so thoroughly into the colour scheme that her figure, though central, is barely discernible.Sometimes he has both effects, Mary Celeste and "Find the Lady", together. I was looking at White Interior (1932) for a while, thinking "How's he done it? How does he get such a strong feeling that someone has just gone out, and will shortly return?" - something to do with the relationship of the orange chair and the white door - and then I saw that she was in fact there, nearly in the middle of the picture, but hidden by the way, bending behind the table to play with a cat, she virtually blends with the carpet.Bonnard famously said he wanted his paintings to give the impression of someone just entering a room, an optical overload, more than can be taken in at a glance Here that's just what happens. You go through the sequence thinking first "She's definitely around somewhere", and then "Ah, Marthe, there you are!" - or more coolly "Oh, there she is".