Pierre Bonnard & Art In The New Hell

1. Seeking Solace In A Basement

On one of the many days when I felt battered by the news—the gleeful torching of all the little bits of good left in America—I drove to the library. Might as well, I figured. Next month there may not be a library to go to. I slunk down to the building’s bottom floor and sorted through the oversized section. There, I grasped my quarry: Painting Arcadia, the companion book to the San Francisco Fine Art Museum’s retrospective on the French neo-impressionist Pierre Bonnard.

(In Summer, 1931)

I spent the rest of the afternoon in Bonnard’s dreamland. His work is perfect for this moment of extreme anxiety, hatred, and what people have taken to calling “uncertainty,” though that word isn’t right. The feeling is more akin to presyncope—the sensation of losing control of your body right before you pass out. The ground no longer seems solid. It feels like we are living next to unseen precipices: job loss, political violence, the climate crisis, coronavirus, you name it. Intense and prolonged disorientation.

At first, Bonnard seems a bizarre companion for these dizzying times. His work meditates on lush gardens, sun-filled rooms, sumptuous breakfasts, and nude women whose bodies communicate intimacy rather than burning eroticism. (I can see why many critics have written him off as a lightweight, one of the froo-froo snoozefest Impressionists.) However, the beauty captured in Bonnard’s paintings isn’t the creamy-faced bourgeois contentment of Renoir, but a beauty that can only be reached by someone who’s suffered and lived to tell the tale. As the critic Isabelle Cahn put it, “Capturing sublime instants in the most beautiful light possible—the silver gleam of Normandy or the fiery glow of the Côte d’Azur—was for Bonnard the very subject of his paintings. But Bonnard’s Eden remains inextricably linked to Hell.”

The vibrancy of Bonnard’s colors and the exuberant physicality of his brushstrokes—you sometimes feel he can’t put down paint fast enough—enabled him to hide his agony in plain sight. When the Tate put on a retrospective of Bonnard in 2019, they advised viewers to “slow look” at the works, spending around 10 minutes with each piece. This is necessary with Bonnard, as the intensity of his colors and textures have a way of obscuring figures, even to art aficionados. “[I]t took me two visits (and scrolling through photographs on my phone) to notice a third figure, reflected in a window pane in The Dining Room, Vernon,” said Figgy Guyver, assistant editor of the art magazine Tate, Etc. The ghostly apparition, possibly Bonnard himself, is barely able to exist in the rich and lovely dining room.

There’s a living force in Bonnard’s paintings, a vitality of physical and emotional movement. Take The Checkered Blouse, which features a young woman eating breakfast while a naughty cat attempts to swipe some for himself. The eponymous blouse seems to move. You can almost hear it rustling, along with the cat’s frustrated meows. The painting is comprised almost entirely of square splotches, emphasizing the “checkered” pattern. The rough, loose brushwork is typical of Bonnard. His technique seems almost careless. You can catch errant flecks of paint in many of his still lives, including Fruit and Fruit Dishes (1930). But this spontaneity is an act. Bonnard was a fastidious painter, often returning to the same canvas and adding touch-ups dozens of times. He was known to work on a painting off and on for years. In this way, he’s a lot like the comic W.C. Fields, whose relaxed, boozy antics were only possible due to grueling preparation. One of Fields’s signature moves was to kick a fallen hat up and have it land on his head. It took two years of incessant practice to be able to do this trick to his satisfaction. Bonnard was the same. Only by constant rehearsal could he capture the speedy movement of life. And like Fields, the easy joy on the surface of his works provided cover for a raging melancholy.

***

I took time to feel the book’s weight on my lap, to hear the crinkles of its plastic protective cover, to smell the dusty-glue scent of a book that’s been long unopened. I felt a sense of calm return to me.

Bonnard lived in chaotic and agonizing times, albeit with the cushion of a bourgeois background. He lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and numerous regime changes. And yet he kept painting. Kept returning to the same canvas. Kept adjusting.

I’m sure there were times both men felt silly about their intensity, especially when others dashed forward in their work. But there’s value in building something up in yourself brick-by-brick, whether that be the ability to do a vaudeville trick, to paint motion, or to deepen your capacity for political action.

***

You can see Bonnard’s “Hell” most clearly in his self-portraits. In contrast to the colorful visions of his other works, these self-portraits are dominated by smudgy grays and lifeless browns. He obscures his face with shadows and shunts his body into corners. In one portrait from 1945, there are holes where his eyes should be.

(The Boxer, 1931)

His personal life was also dramatic and, in its own way, tragic. The Boxer is his most telling self-portrait. In it, he rages impotently at his reflection in a bathroom mirror—a room tied tightly to his wife within his personal symbology. Whether he’s raging at his wife, her illness, their loneliness, or his own persistent melancholy, we cannot know. What we do know is that Bonnard continues to fight despite knowing he’s too feeble to defeat his opponent. Bonnard was in a relationship with Marthe de Meligny for 49 years, ending with her death in 1942. Theirs was a passionate, unbreakable bond that was nonetheless marred by de Meligny’s crippling paranoia and depression. To alleviate her symptoms, doctors prescribed long daily baths. Which is why we find Bonnard-as-Boxer fighting in the corner of a bathroom.

Maybe he was fighting a ghost, one that clung to every moment of his marriage. Although Bonnard and de Meligny became a couple in 1893, they didn’t marry for more than 30 years. Bonnard often slept with other women—not exactly a shocking move for a 19th-century French artist. De Meligny seems to have more or less tolerated casual flings. A skilled painter in her own right, she understood his need to liaise with models. That was until 1916, when Bonnard met Renée Monchaty.

(Portrait of Renée Monchaty, 1920)

Bonnard fell for the young and vivacious Monchaty. This infuriated de Meligny, who’d dedicated her life to being Bonnard’s partner and muse. Her mental health declined further upon the emergence of this petite, blonde, and girlish romantic rival. De Meligny was then in her late 40s, with dark hair and an athletic build. According to the critic Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold, she “developed a kind of theory of healthy living that grew into a mania for improving the world. She increasingly attempted to isolate Bonnard from the rest of society … Marthe wouldn’t even allow his painter friends to visit the house anymore.”

Bonnard considered leaving his increasingly unstable partner for Monchaty. Some sources refer to the young woman as his fiancée, though there’s no evidence of a formal proposal. It’s more likely they discussed the potential for a married future. Then, suddenly in August of 1925, Bonnard and de Meligny tied the knot in a sequence of events the reclusive couple never divulged. A month later, a distraught Monchaty committed suicide.

There are conflicting versions of Monchaty’s death. The more plausible version, in my estimation, is that she shot herself in bed while surrounded by white roses—a flower commonly associated with brides. Other accounts say that Bonnard discovered her body in a bathtub, her wrists slashed open. If that version is true, it lends a new dimension to his many paintings of women bathing. The tub was Marthe’s refuge and Renée’s tomb. What was it for Bonnard? It was both, it seems.

Arguably his most famous painting is 1936’s Nude In Bathtub. At first glance, the painting excites the eye with its bursts of light and color—bright blue floor tiles, dapples of sunlight, and materials right out of The Yellow Brick Road. But then the eye settles on the bathing woman in the center, her stillness nearing unnatural. “Is this a woman in the tub or a corpse entombed?” Skye Sherwin mused in The Guardian. Bonnard created several variants of this painting, as was his habit. In one from the early 1940s, he zooms out so we can see a small dog curled up on the bathmat. The dog is positioned so that if the woman steps out of the bath, she’ll crush this loyal creature. But then again, she may not get up at all.

(Nude In Bath, 1936)

In unraveling the Bonnard-de Meligny marriage, I am tempted to describe it using the typical methods the media uses when faced with difficult relationships: assigning one person the role of aggressor and the other the role of victim. But I feel this would be inadequate. Critic Michael Kimmelman put it best in his book The Accidental Masterpiece: “Bonnard is the great example of an artist who made the most of a relationship that, to outsiders, seemed tragic, but which proves that all relationships are finally unknowable except to those inside them. We can only know that Marthe allowed Bonnard to lead the productive artistic life that he did.” There’s an enigmatic quality of their relationship that no speculation can adequately puncture. It’s not a marriage I would want, but it wasn’t my marriage to have. But Bonnard didn’t forget about Monchaty. He kept his last, luminous portrait of her in his studio and retouched it over and over until his death over 20 years later.

Kimmelman was attuned to the specific magic of Bonnard’s ambivalence—his ability to capture mixed and contradictory emotions within a single scene. “Bonnard was thought to be too soft; modern art has accustomed us to abrasiveness. We’re wary of an art of such paradisiacal beauty, whose complexity and peculiar sadness aren’t immediately apparent,” said Kimmelman. Bonnard excelled at capturing ambivalence. He excelled at living in it, too. I don’t think he ever resolved the question of his romantic entanglements, despite outliving both his paramours.

***

It was Bonnard’s ambivalence that drew me to him in 2025, as Donald Trump’s second term started off with a revenge spree targeted at whoever refused servitude. Within weeks of his inauguration, he fired inspectors general across the federal government—officials whose job was to investigate waste and corruption. He appointed noted puppy killer Kristi Noem to head ICE and turbocharged its budget, while programs that kept people alive got slashed to the quick. I found in Bonnard’s paintings the first deep gasps of air after a panic attack. I found the feeling of a good day amid a string of bad ones. Of quiet moments secreted away during long chaos.

In the presence of these paintings, I was able to ground myself and escape from the whirl of presyncope without denying the clear and present dangers of the current moment. My partner was a federal worker, adding personal anxiety to my rage at the new regime’s method of rule by narcissistic whim. Some critics have dismissed Bonnard’s emotional nuance as wishy-washy frivolity. Picasso was a noted hater, for example. His buddy Christian Zervos—editor of the influential French art magazine Cahiers d’Art—marked the occasion of Bonnard’s death with a stinging rebuke: “It is evident that this reverence [for Bonnard’s work] is shared only by people who know nothing about the great difficulties of art and cling above all to what is facile and agreeable.” Because Bonnard painted landscapes and domestic interiors, the emotional depth of his work was often overlooked.

Speaking to Kimmelman, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson explained the enmity between Picasso and Bonnard this way: “You know, Picasso didn’t like Bonnard and I can imagine why, because Picasso had no tenderness. It is only a very flat explanation to say that Bonnard is looking in a mirror ... He’s looking far, far beyond. To me he is the greatest painter of the century. Picasso was a genius, but that is something quite different.”

As we can see with Guernica, Picasso confronted the world’s terrors by exposing the ugliness. He plunged unflinchingly into the abyss of human depravity, dragging his viewers down into it with him. There’s much to admire in this. But in 2025, there’s something vital about Bonnard’s approach. I felt mesmerized by that book from the library. As I examined its pages, I had a feeling akin to a key slipping into a lock.

In my creative work and in my life, I yearn to cultivate Bonnard’s ability to see joy and sorrow as woven together, a warp and weft that is able to exist only through their mutual tension. We need a way out of presyncope. We need to regain our equilibrium after being battered. Every day, a new outrage, a lower low. Plus: clickbait, doomscroll, hot take. We need something else.

I posted some of Bonnard’s paintings to my Instagram stories. Friends and acquaintances praised the compositions’ color, clarity, and calm. A former roommate revealed she had a print of Nude In Bathtub in her newly furnished living room. Something resonated with people. We were all feeling this same need for ... what? I didn’t have words for it yet.

II. Adapting To This Trembling Moment

I live in a college town. College is a time famous for its cultivation of wide-eyed idealism, but today’s students are more often than not beleaguered, exhausted, and drifting. A friend of mine is a therapist with many students for clients. She speaks of their numbness: Emotional paralysis is their baseline. When life feels like a slow-motion car crash, all you can do is brace for impact.

This numbness is what makes Bonnard’s work feel so urgent now. His paintings offer a third way between Picasso’s unflinching confrontation with horror and the numbed-out dissociation that’s become many people’s default mode. While college students—and so many of the rest of us—have learned to protect ourselves by feeling nothing, Bonnard insists we can feel everything: the beauty and the terror, the intimacy and the isolation, the hope and the grief.

Part of the reason art was so disappointing during Trump’s first administration was its inability to develop new emotional capacity. It didn’t engage with the present as a novel moment, but as a continuation of older struggles—ones where we knew the contours of our battlefields and how to win on them. Take Mike Mitchell’s NO 45 logo, which spread like wildfire across social media. It’s meant to shock the viewer by combining a number associated with Trump (he was the 45th president) with a swastika. This only works in a society that’s viscerally horrified by Nazism, not one in which 23% of Americans think Hitler did some good things.

As I absorbed the book of Bonnard’s paintings, I felt a new chamber of emotional capacity open. Or, at the very least, the door cracked. Take The Window, which dates to the year of Monchaty’s suicide. Painted from Bonnard’s point of view, The Window captures the view from a hotel room in Le Cannet, a suburb of the French city of Cannes. The city’s beauty is illustrated, but only through a window whose muntins obscure the sights. De Meligny looks down at the city from an adjacent balcony. She’s too far away for the couple to enjoy the scene together. There’s the chill of spring wind in the picture, a cold fluttering touching every surface. In the foreground sits the artist’s desk, covered in unfinished works, a pen, and an inkwell.

Most prominent, though, is a square book emblazoned with the name “Marie.” It may harken back to a previous artistic glory: Bonnard had illustrated the novel Marie by Peter Nansen some 25 years earlier. It may also be a subtle reference to Marthe de Meligny’s birth name, Maria Boursin. He learned of her birth name only after their marriage, when he also learned that she was not an orphan, as she’d maintained for more than 30 years. She had living parents and siblings.

(The Window, 1925)

It must’ve made Bonnard uneasy to know that de Meligny had so easily—and needlessly—deceived him for so long. Though, he never expressed that sentiment to anyone. Yet, his inner conflict is evident. The Window is a masterclass in ambivalence. You can see the couple’s intimacy and their remove—those icy boundaries that impaled their relationship. But, within the painting there’s also warmth and a lovely city beckoning the couple into its embrace.

While Bonnard’s emotional hesitations led artists like Picasso to conclude that he was made of inferior stuff, his approach fits perfectly into our current world. Recent history shows that we cannot rely on art that shocks us into action, because we’ve become unshockable. We cannot depend on straightforward heroic narratives, because our battles are too complex for such simplicity. Bonnard shows us how to hold contradictions without collapsing, to acknowledge beauty without denying horror, and to maintain tenderness in the face of cruelty.

The world of the Impressionists was, like our own, rocked by shockwaves of change. During the 19th century, France cycled through seven different governments, all while becoming a colonial superpower. The Industrial Revolution obliterated traditional ways of life, replacing them with an urbanized and mechanized society. In response, Impressionism shook the art world. It was the first art movement to embrace that the world had irrevocably changed and that no painting of virginal women holding lambs and babies could undo the fact women now worked for wages in bars.

At the time of its emergence, the French art world lived under the stranglehold of L’Académie des Beaux-Arts, an influential society that promoted academic painting, a conservative tradition that wanted everyone to paint stuff from The Bible, Greek myths, and other fusty subjects that had little to do with day-to-day life. The Impressionists burst free from this tradition. They painted scenes from contemporary life, from seaside bathing to seedy bars. By leaving visible brushstrokes and painting their “impressions” of real life, rather than idealized scenes from the (often imagined) past, they asserted the importance of contemporary human experience. These were works of emotion and sensation. They left the art establishment aghast. It’s hard to remember now that every dentist’s office has a Monet print.

III. Dreaming as a Means of Resistance

I resent that hope and joy have become confused with each other through the Democratic Party’s empty usage of both. Joy is an emotion. Hope is a way of moving through the world with conviction and determination. Hope is a conscious decision to stop ceding control of the future to the machinations of those who wish harm on us. I’m a democratic socialist, which means (as an American) I’ve experienced many crushing setbacks, including that the Democratic National Committee kneecapped Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign not just once, but twice.

Misfortunes like these make it tempting to develop a protective cynicism and stop dreaming of a better world. To keep going in such dispiriting circumstances, we addict ourselves to distraction. We dissociate, we doomscroll, and we do whatever feels like the opposite of “be here now” because we do not want to be here. How can we recover our ability to dream? How can we strengthen our imaginations and widen our sense of the possible? To understand this, there’s something vital in Bonnard’s paintings, the way they draw you in with sensuous beauty before you see their sadness, and then, finally, recognize the necessity of both sides of his trick coin. As Kimmelman said, “[w]ith Bonnard there is no aggression, no voyeurism even, only an impression of him graciously losing himself … dreaming up something joyful out of this claustrophobia.”

Bonnard’s paintings are slow and quiet, like the first moments of waking when consciousness overlaps with dreams. In his works, I find a way to see the good still with us without denying the bad. I see a joy that doesn’t disavow sorrow. I see a place to plan a better world that we can, in fact, achieve. Bonnard didn’t stay separated from the beauty of Le Cannet. He went down and savored that city. He bought a house there two years after painting The Window. Today, there’s a museum dedicated to him in that city’s center.

I suspect that we, in America, will have to get used to ordinary kindness, political action, and growth. We will need to accustom ourselves to victories won out of long patience. And I just know that a country used to having it all—to being the best, richest, and most important—will not love turning toward the hesitating humility emblematized by Bonnard. As Curzio Malaparte said while living under Italian fascism, “Only humility can save us from this humiliation.” But our allies (understandably) turn away, and imperialism’s most monstrous tendencies are manifest, so we must turn.

What I have learned from Bonnard is that resistance sometimes looks like returning to the same canvas for years, adding careful touches that no one else will notice. I learned not to look away from the horror, but not to let it be the only thing I see. We can look far, far beyond our own reflections in the mirror. We can make our own dreamlands.