Metropolitan Museum of Art

If you visit Bonnard show at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82nd & 5th Ave., see other collection in the Museum.

Modern art

With more than 10,000 artworks, primarily by European and American artists, the modern art collection occupies 60,000 square feet (6,000 m²), of gallery space and contains many iconic modern works. Cornerstones of the collection include Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Jasper Johns's White Flag, Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), and Max Beckmann's triptych Beginning. Certain artists are represented in remarkable depth, for a museum whose focus is not exclusively on modern art: for example, the collection contains forty paintings by Paul Klee, spanning his entire career. Due to the Met's long history, "contemporary" paintings acquired in years past have often migrated to other collections at the museum, particularly to the American and European Paintings departments.

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.

Book List/Expectations

Book List

Available in Shakespeare & Co.

Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin)

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (Harcourt)

Joyce, James. Ulysses, Gabler ed. (Random House)

Eliot, T.S. Wasteland and other Poems (Dover)

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Grove)

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth (Vintage)

Other shorter readings to be distributed in class.


Course Expectations:

Papers: Two papers (3pp., 15pp.)

Oral Presentations: One short presentation on critical views of works being read.

Final Exam

Absences: Two absences allowed. Upon the third absence, you will be dropped from the course.

Office Hours: Thursday, 2:00-3:30. You will be expected to have a conference with me on the subject of your longer paper in Feb.-April. Final paper due, April 30th.

Office: Boylan, 2/157

E-mail: plaurence@rcn.com

Reserve Books in the Library: for consultation for papers and class presentations.

Bibliography (Selected)

Twentieth-Century Literature:Selected Works in Criticism-P. Laurence Spring ‘09

Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-38 (2006).

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1964).

Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination (1981).

Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968).

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures
and Spaces (2005).

Brown, Nicholas. Utopian Generations (2005).

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).

Mazei. Domestic Modernism and Inter-War Novel (2006).

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity (1987).

Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992).

Collier, Patrick. Modernism on Fleet Street [relation of press to early 20c British lit] (2006).

Dettmar, Kevin & Stephen Watt (eds.) Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion,
Canonization and Reading (1996).

Doyle, Laura & Laura Winkiel. Geomodernism: Race, Modernims and Modernity (2005)
[modernist art in Brazil, Lebanon, India, Taiwan, Dublin, Native American].

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory (2003).

Friedman, Susan, “Periodizing Modernisms: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space
Time Borders of Modernist Studies” Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006).

Gifford. Don. Ulysses Annotated: Guide to Reading Ulysses (1989).

Hamner, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1992).

Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Visual Cultures (2002).
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (1986).

Joshi, Priya. In Another Culture: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2002).

Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices (1978).

King, Bruce Alvin. Derek Walcott: A Carribean Life (biography) (2001).

Lassner, Phyllis. British Women Novelists (includes Indian authors) & Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses (2008).

Laurence, Patricia. The Reading of Silence (1992), Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (2003).

Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (1981) and De-Colonizing Tradition.

Levenson, Michael. A Geneology of Modernism (1984).

Lukacs, Geog. Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (chapter on “The
Ideology of Modernism”) (1971).

MacKay, Marina. Modernism and World War II (2007).

Marek, Jane E. Women Editing Modernism: Literary Magazines and Literary History
(1995).

Mazei. Domestic Modernism and Inter-War Novel (2006).

Nelson, Cary & Laurence Grossberg. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (see
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) ( 1988).

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995).

Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998).

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (Essay on Mrs. Dalloway, vol. II) (1984.

Said, Edward. Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Refiguring Modernism:
Postmodern Feminst Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes (1995).

Walkowitz, Rebecca and Douglas Mao. Bad Modernisms (2006).

Williams, Patrick, ed. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (1994).

Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media and Propaganda (2006).