Bonnard show at Metropolitian Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, until April 19th

What is the subject of his paintings? What takes center stage? What is "modernist" about his eye? Of what other modern painter does he remind you?

Bonnard's Haunting Domesticity

Raquel Laneri, 02.02.09, 04:00 PM EST

The maligned French painter gets his due at the Met.

In Pictures: Bonnard's Haunting Domesticity

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Jan. 27-April 19

Ten years ago, an art exhibit with the words "interior" or "still life" in the title would have had me running away to the nearest modern art wing. Breakfast rooms? Baskets of apples? Yawn--give me drip paintings and amorphous blobs! The less a painting resembled something concrete I could identify--and the less conventionally pretty it was--the more I was convinced of its depth, and the more I liked it.

I imagine, then, I would have found "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors," on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a bore: post-impressionistic bowls of bright red cherries, vases of mimosas and sunlit rooms.

And while the French painter was painting these happy, pretty pictures, his contemporaries were dismantling art and inventing cubism. Indeed, the cubists did not take kindly to Bonnard's retrograde aesthetic. "That is not painting, what he does," Pablo Picasso said of his contemporary's work, calling it "a potpourri of indecision."

But how things change. Often what once seemed simple reveals itself over time to be infinitely complex. Wolfgang Mozart didn't just write pretty incidental music for the court, Jane Austen didn't just write love stories and Bonnard didn't just paint pretty flowers, bowls of fruit and tabletops.

In Pictures: Bonnard's Haunting Domesticity

"The Late Interiors" is the first show dedicated solely to Bonnard's late interiors and still lifes, spanning the artist's last 25 years, from 1923 (when he was 57) to 1947 (a month or so before his death). The 80 works on display demonstrate not only the artist's radiant use of light and color but also the extraordinary complexity of his work.