The Multiplication Of Realities

"In this painting the mirror, which in Effet de glace defines the picture plane and is the size of the canvas itself, now hovers in the center of the composition, and the dressing table has become more fully visible.  Certainly, Bonnard's domestic scenario and its inhabitants---Marthe, his dogs, Marthe's dressing table mirror, the objects on the dressing table itself, even the coverlets on the bed--remain remarkably undisrupted over the years.  Yet, if one examines photographs taken by Bonnard of the same interiors he painted, or if one reads contemporary accounts of Marthe's difficult and neurotic temperament, one recognizes that Bonnard was engaged in a willful transformation of reality.  John Berger has suggested that Picasso's statement that art is a lie, and it is the artist's task to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies, is a sign that he believes in magic.  If so, Bonnard, too, believed in his powers as a magician.  But where Picasso exaggerates the distinction between object and image and makes the task of being convinced difficult, Bonnard goes to great lengths to convince his audience that he has reduced this distance between object and image.

Here, Bonnard seeks to convince us of the actuality of the existence of this image in the real world.  We are to believe then, that he, as a painter, is merely pointing out to the viewer the miracle of the painting he has 'found' in the mirror.  The informality of the composition, the deliberately undistinguished account of the objects on the dressing table, and the seemingly arbitrary cropping--all these are calculated intellectual decisions meant to encourage our belief in the passivity of the artist and his insistence that he is merely revealing his world as it exists.  The finding of the image in the mirror becomes a metaphor for the way Bonnard sees himself as making art, for the way he 'finds' a painting.

The nature of material reality and the nature of perception are being simultaneously questioned and examined.  Bonnard mixes up our order of perception.  The conventional heirarchy of one's experience of reality is inverted so that the reflection in the mirror of the dressing table which reveals a simple interior---a window with a blowing curtain, a bed, and in the far corner the high-breasted torso and long legs of Marthe, barely visible--has a depth and clarity of contour, a greater painted 'reality' than the dressing table and still-life which, ostensibly, exist in palpable space.  The dressing table is painted with a soft, feathery touch--the whites and blue-whites create a sense of hovering weightlessness versus the stronger-hued and more emphatically defined shapes in the mirror's reflection.  Slowly, one becomes aware of the multiplication of realities, all equal, all different, represented by the different types of windows--the canvas itself, the mirror and the actual window to the outdoors reflected in the mirror."

--Sasha M. Newman, Bonnard: The Late Paintings





Pierre Bonnard, Dressing Table and Mirror, oil on canvas, 1913



Pierre Bonnard, Effet de Glace (or Le Tub), oil on canvas, 1909