Throughout his career, Pierre Bonnard’s talent was grossly underestimated. And that’s putting it nicely. In Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot recalls the Spanish artist saying of Bonnard, “That’s not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose...The result is a potpourri of indecision.”
    Still other peers wrote him off as a has-been, an Impressionist copycat, a maker of quaint, bourgeois pictures who ignored the social and political convulsions going on around him. Indeed, during the run-up to World War I—while Picasso was busy denouncing civil war in his seminal “Guernica,” and Salvador Dalî was composing nightmarish visions of melted clocks—Bonnard was producing delicately speckled landscapes and interiors.
    ‘‘Bonnard matured at a period of time in French art when Surrealism, Fauvism and Dada were all in full swing, so he was an absolute anomaly in that context,” explains Dita Amory, curator of the exhibition “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (January 27 to April 19). “I don’t think he was given his due in his day.”
    Even after his death in 1947 at age 80, the painter was long overlooked. Family squabbles over the ownership of the art he left behind meant that those works were in escrow and unknown to the public until the 1960s, when the dispute was finally settled.
    It was not until 1984 that the tide began to turn in Bonnard’s favor. The French curator and art historian Jean Clair’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou—“Bonnard: Les dernières années”—traveled the world and opened minds to the wonders of Bonnard. In the two decades that followed, a succession of shows—including those at London’s Tate Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—boosted Bonnard’s standing in the art world and sparked a burst of public and critical interest.
    John Elderfield, MoMA’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at the time of its 1998 Bonnard retrospective, expressed this new way of looking at the artist. “On the surface, Bonnard’s paintings appear to gently extend the art of the Impressionists,” he wrote in his introduction to the show. “Looked at more closely, they are far more extreme. At first sight, their subject matter is solely the behavior of people and the effects of light in scenes from what often looks like an intensely private existence. To spend time in front of these paintings, however, is to see them change. Figures and objects will move in and out of the viewer’s attention, as each painting seems to present an analysis of the processes of seeing and remembering.”
    What the MoMA show and all the other exhibitions had in common was an abundance of pictures showing Bonnard’s wife, Marthe, in a white tub. Bonnard made around 150 such paintings, so they were a lasting leitmotif.
    The Metropolitan exhibition will be different. “You can’t leave a Bonnard exhibition without that resonant memory of Marthe in the bath over and over again,” Amory says. “I thought I would do an exhibition of late interiors without Marthe in the bath, to look at his technique and methodology.” In quality, she asserts, his interiors rank as highly as his celebrated bathtub scenes. Visitors to the exhibition may well agree.

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