Painting the Present after Impressionism: Pierre Bonnard and Time’s Continuous Duration

The idea of the living present, rather than the idea of the present standing still, was integral to the artistic project of Bonnard. A painter of intimate middle-class worlds, using many of the visual techniques of the impressionists, Bonnard nonetheless reflected deeply on Cubism and the ‘conditions of vision’. This chapter reveals Bonnard’s expansion of the present in his painting. The daydream, the absorption of a living, colourful creature in its own world, indicates a sense of a human present that can be depicted in a present that extends itself into the world of dream and memory. Bonnard was concerned with subjective experience: the deeper present that a photograph could never capture. He saw movement in his painting as a reflection of lived experience, rather than the abstract study of movement for movement’s sake that characterised the Futurists. And by turning away from bustling street scenes, focusing more and more on his wife Marthe in his postwar work, Bonnard built up an œuvre that was concerned with painting as a deepening and enriching of the time in which viewer and subject encounter one another. The iterative nature of his studies allowed a sense of continuous engagement with the present in which the artist was becoming seduced all over again with his partner.