In defence of Bonnard
The Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak has taken recently to rubbishing some of the big figures of 20th-century art. Henry Moore, Leger and now Bonnard have received the treatment. And he is not above using scatology to signal his contempt: he has referred to Moore’s ‘turds’ and asks ‘what is that shit-brown rectangle?’ in one of Bonnard’s paintings. Picasso apparently dismissed Bonnard’s work as ‘a pot-pourri of indecision’, and that gives Januszczak confidence in his judgment. He seems to think that Bonnard had no idea of which colour to use and squeezed out blobs at random, before dotting them over his canvases, and that his reputation as a great colourist is a myth. It doesn’t occur to the journalist-critic that this building-up with small brush strokes is leading to a finished product of deliberate intention. The technique is not dissimilar to that used by Cezanne with a very different intention and outcome. I haven’t actually seen the Tate exhibition which Januszcz