Wings of a Butterfly

About

The starting point for the exhibition is Pierre Bonnard’s final diary entry, written in 1946, shortly before his death in January 1947:

“I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly”.

All of the invited artists have thought about Bonnard in different ways, perhaps using his work a little, or at least thinking about it in relation to their own, though what they do with those thoughts is very different. It’s a question of spirit, rather than influence, conjuring a collective mood and with a connective thread it is something to do with what Andrew Cranston has described as Bonnard’s ‘nervy hesitancy’:

“I love his doubt which is visible on the canvas… this keeps an openness and some work for the viewer to do”, words which echo Bonnard’s own declaration that “the painting will not exist if the viewer does not do half the work.”

There’s a hazy quality to Bonnard’s later paintings (what David Sylvester described as muzziness) which embraces a kind of uncertainty. It’s what Picasso so rudely referred to as ‘a potpourri of indecision’, but which now feels like one of his most compelling qualities, allowing the paintings to appear completely resolved whilst teetering on the edge of disintegration - ready to fail, yet always holding together.

Andrew Cranston: “Bonnard’s bath paintings blew me away when I first saw them on an art school trip to Paris in 1991 (a bus from Aberdeen). Paintings as dream, floating ephemeral watery dream, Marthe’s body sometimes barely visible, as if there had been a fusion at a molecular level of bath and person…. [Picasso’s] Guernica is a great painting and arguably more important than any of Bonnard’s bath painting, but I don’t think about Guernica much. I think about Bonnard every time I’m in a bathroom.”

Many of the painters in this exhibition make works that exists in the hinterland between experience and memory: the gap between how we remember things and how they are. As Bonnard described it in 1942:

“I have my subjects all at hand. I go see them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before painting, I think, I dream.”

As Aubrey Levinthal has put it: “Bonnard has been a touchstone, particularly in his process. A while ago I read how he works only from memory, going out on walks to gather information. And he described seeing from behind his eyes, of capturing the way a first glimpse of a room feels, and the urgency to get that down, the time between seeing it and painting it captured behind his eyelids. It was very freeing and wonderful to read and has stayed in my mind - his work has that authentic distorted response that memory so often has.”