Bonnard's Wife And Mine Poem by gershon hepner

Bonnard paints her enigmatic,
ageless in her bath, his lovely wife.
to stimulate more sexual static
in my well-aged but loving life
that I can sense in Bonnard’s painting
I like to share within a shower
hot water with my wife, acquainting
myself with her electric power
as soon as we have dried with towels
our bodies which will soon be wet
again when she exclaims the vowels
that validate our etiquette.
There is nothing that can over-
shadow her in water, and
when she is ready for her lover,
I do not drily take her hand.


Roberta Smith reviews an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s painting at the Metropolitan Museum (“Bonnard Late in Life, Searching for the Light, ” NYT, January 20,3009) :
By the last quarter-century of his long, productive career, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was deep into what might be called his Red-Yellow-Orange Period. These colors dominate “Pierre Bonnard: the Late Interiors, ” a sumptuous exhibition that lends some unseasonable warmth to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically to the tepid lower level of its Robert Lehman Collection. The fiery hues may be offset with touches of green, blue and darker tones; they may be intermittently superseded by expanses of pulsing white — a snowy door or mantelpiece or, most often, a blazing tablecloth. But generally they reign supreme among the show’s 80 or so paintings, drawings and watercolors. All are interiors or still lifes or, best, a hybrid; all were made from 1923, when Bonnard was 56, to the end of 1946, a month or so before his death. Dita Amory, the show’s organizer and acting associate curator in charge of the Lehman Collection, is happy to do without the grander, cooler, lavender-silver paintings of his enigmatic, ageless wife, Marthe, in her bath that are usually celebrated as Bonnard’s greatest works, most recently during the Museum of Modern Art’s 1998 Bonnard retrospective. Ms. Amory’s theory here is that those masterpieces have overshadowed all else. While the Met show is a bit too uneven to make the case, it contains plenty of wonderful paintings that reveal the artist meditating on the nature of time, perception, memory and the ways and means of painting, while reviewing the glories of early modernism and tying up some of its loose ends. In addition, he brought back to Western painting a radiance of color little seen since the Sienese.


1/30/09