Julian Bell at nonsite:
“The museums are full of uprooted pictures,” Pierre Bonnard once said. The artist was anxious for his pictorial seedlings. They might be thrust out into galleries in which they would struggle for survival among alien life forms and in which the climate might prove too chill—above all, the light too bleak. In the light of the South of France, he said, everything is sharp and your painting shimmers. Take it to Paris and the blues turn to grey. And therefore, you can never paint violently enough. You must be violent with your colour; you must heighten the tones in order to counteract this problem of pictures dwindling away in their impact as they are transposed from one place to the other.
Discussing Bonnard in the lecture theatre or in print, this issue of uprooting remains. I want here to consider some aspects of the artist’s later work, in particular his interiors and still lives*: my point of departure will be the oil painting entitled Bouquet of Mimosas. The more or less two-foot-square object in question has an irregular surface that in places is thinly scuffed and stained, with the off-white of the canvas primer raw to the eye, and that in others is thick, ruckled, and bumpy, with blobby conglomerations of cadmium yellows and reds.
more here.
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