Painter Prophet of Modernism

While growing up, I spent hours in the company of Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings were part of the collections at the Phillips and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I'd forego my homework, opting to be transported to the South of France to bask in the spectacular colors of his sun-kissed landscapes, or to luxuriate in the warmth of his domestic scenes, dense with mood and familial comfort.

Now, with the arrival of "Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia" at the Legion of Honor, it's like visiting a beloved old friend. Even if your connection to this artist doesn't run as deep, the traveling exhibition of 70 works, which originated at the Musee d'Orsay, is an antidote to Super Bowl fatigue or whatever ails you.

Often unfairly derided as merely a decorative painter of pretty pictures, Bonnard was a complex and sophisticated artist, as is amply demonstrated in this beautiful show of his paintings. Early on, he fell in with Les Nabis, a group of rebels pledged to reinvigorating the moribund medium of painting that included his Post-Impressionist, avant-garde co-horts, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard. (Nabis roughly translates to prophets, as in prophets of modern art.)

Close to Monet and Renoir and inspired by Matisse, with whom he corresponded in the 1820s, Bonnard is considered a bridge between Post-Impressionism and Modernism. His skewed, vertiginous perspectives, like those one might find peering down into the viewfinder of a box camera, suggest he was influenced by photography, as does his radical cropping, and he was already incorporating elements of abstraction into compositions that never lost sight of a central humanity.

In one of the show's most extraordinary works, the stunning "Nude in an Interior" (1912-14), for example, the barely visible face and attenuated nude body of his long-time girlfriend and eventual wife, Marthe, who's at a coy remove, are nearly obscured by the doorframe that opens onto a back room. The painting is dominated by well-defined vertical planes, but the deep magenta and blues of the carpet and cheery tangerine and rose wallpaper surreptitiously steal our attention away from the erotic promise just out of view.

Aside from modern Paris, women, especially naked or nearly naked women in the privacy of the boudoir or bath, were his favorite subjects. "Woman Dozing on a Bed" (1899), a languorous, blatantly erotic depiction of his partner reclining, thighs apart, on rumpled bed sheets, illuminated by discolored antique gold light, was among his first nudes. In "Nude in the Bathtub" (1925), only the bather's pale legs, floating in the water like a corpse, are visible. The narrow white tub, which bisects the canvas, looks as though it's standing upright; a headless figure, possibly Bonnard, enters stage right, and clothes are draped across a bluish-toned upholstered bench in a changing room beyond. The aura is tinged with emotional unrest and a touch of the macabre, not surprising given the work was painted after the suicide of Bonnard's mistress, who killed herself when she discovered he had married Marthe.

The exhibition opens with his early Nabi period, shaped by Japonisme, a craze in vogue with the public in general and European artists in particular who gravitated to Japanese woodblock prints. Those influences permeate "Women in the Garden" (1890-91), a quartet of gorgeous rectangular paintings of chic women in patterned finery and hats that once formed a single canvas before being divided into panels.

Though there are many examples of large-scale landscapes, it's the intimate paintings that are most magnetic. Bonnard pulls you into compressed interiors, toward subjects like his brother-in-law, who's depicted smoking a pipe by the firelight in a darkened room lent subtle dimension by the crimson wallpaper ("Intimacy," 1891), or "The Checkered Blouse" (1892), a marvelous crisp portrait of the artist's then-20-year-old sister in a red-and-white gingham top, seated at a kitchen table gingerly picking at food and clutching a contented kitty. The work illustrates his early predilection for layering flat, lively patterns and multiple points of view in the context of three-dimensional spaces. It would be remiss not to mention the solo appearance of "The White Cat" (1894), whose inordinately long and skinny fashion-model legs imply she imbibed a feline version of a "drink me" potion.

Warming orange ochre tones infiltrate the spacious, wood-paneled offices of "The Brothers Bernheim-Jeune" (1920), where two well-to-do, dark-suited business partners convene across from one another at a desk covered with white and lavender documents; adding depth is a large window with a view to a violet garden. It has the authentic feel of a real, lived-in place.

But, for paradise, Bonnard journeyed almost every year to the South of France, where he found and brought to vivid life - for himself and for us - the radiant visual splendor of a place he compared to an "Arabian Nights experience." The iridescent blue seas, the sun's changing yellow light softly bathing pastel houses and tropical orange mimosas made for a turn-of-the-century Garden of Eden, or the idyllic Arcadia of Greek mythology, a feast for the eyes realized in the dazzling "Southern Landscape and Two Children" (1916-18) and other works he produced on his sojourns to the French Riviera.

Evidently Bonnard's internal world was not as sunny, judging from a trio of self-portraits, a few of the many he painted. We see him first, in 1904, as a vital, serious fellow of 37, and witness his transformation into a distracted, introspective figure, his face distorted, blurred or yellowed like old papers. The last and most poignant, "The Boxer" (1931), created when he was 64, shows a frail man, his virility fading, with fists raised, ready to fend off mortality. For an artist who filled the heart of the world with so much beauty, Arcadia ultimately proved elusive.

Through May 15 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor