BONNARD'S SECRET LIFE

Pierre Bonnard, the Post-Impressionist master who captured the shimmering beauty of French domestic life, was himself married to the ailing, deluded Marthe, who drew him into a reclusive world where he painted her 385 times. As the Museum of Modern Art prepares to host the first full-scale Bonnard retrospective in New York in 30 years, JOHN RICHARDSON has the untold story of the painter's wife, his mistress's suicide, and the lingering scandals over works he left behind

The first fullscale retrospective of Pierre Bonnard's work to be shown in New York in more than 30 years arrives from London at the Museum of Modern Art on June 21. The organizers—Sarah Whitfield in London and John Elderfield (celebrated for his triumphant 1992 Matisse show) in New York—want us to approach this artist's ravishing work in a modernist spirit. Instead of taking the traditional view of Bonnard as a hedonist who saw French domestic life through rainbow-tinted glasses and rhapsodized about it in shimmering eddies of paint, we should now regard him, the catalogue tells us, "as a profoundly radical painter who . . . devoted a long career to exploring and analyzing the processes of seeing and looking, and to translating ways in which visual perceptions interlock with the processes of memory."

This new interpretation is overdue. So is a better understanding of Bonnard's relationship with his wife, the mysterious and reclusive Marthe, who spent much of her day in the bathtub—a habit that inspired some of her husband's greatest masterpieces. Here, for the First time, is the saga of Marthe's strange life, and the story of how her failure to make a will affected the fortunes of the artist's family as well as the fate of his work.

The 26-year-old Bonnard, son of a senior official at the war ministry, met the birdlike Marthe—soon to be his mistress and model and, much later, his wife—one day in 1893, when he helped her cross the busy Boulevard Haussmann. She made artificial flowers out of artificial pearls for a living and answered to the fancy name of Marthe de Meligny. She told Bonnard she was 16 years old, the daughter of uncaring but genteel parents of Italian lineage, who had handed her over to an indulgent grandmother to raise.

That this was sheer romance did not emerge until Bonnard married Marthe some 30 years later. The birdlike girl's real name was Maria Boursin; she was one of several children of a carpenter from the neighborhood of Bourges, and she had been 24, not 16, when Bonnard picked her up. Marthe's self-aggrandizement should not have surprised him. She apparently suffered from delusions, which may or may not have been symptoms of her chronic asthma or tuberculosis. She distrusted most people and in later life kept herself and her husband shut off from the world in one house or hotel suite after another, where she would spend hours on end in the bath, soaking the demons out of her system, while Bonnard worked away in his studio evoking her at this daily ritual. Whether her tub constitutes a caul or a coffin in his paintings depends on whether one sees her body immersed in amniotic or embalming fluid. Compassion for Marthe's inert state, combined with a certain twisted relish of it, proved to be a continuing source of inspiration for her husband. By the time of her death she had figured in some 385 of his paintings.

Marthe was not so much pretty as jolie-laide: large, furtive eyes peer out from a shy, snouty face under a tea cozy of brownish hair. She had fine long legs and a slim body, the more attractive for not conforming to the hourglass look of the day. But it was above all her enigmatic femininity that captivated Bonnard. Sometime after they met, the artist and his new model photographed each other in the nude—as much for his work as for his pleasure.

Bonnard's early nude paintings of Marthe—especially the ones of her with black stockings half on, half off, looking as rumpled as the bed on which she sits—are explicitly preor postcoital. The same with the magnificent Siesta of 1900: Bonnard portrays her lying provocatively with her face buried in a pillow like the famous marble hermaphrodite in the Louvre, a pose her dog mimics amid the lingerie she has dropped on the floor. In the self-referential Man and Woman of the same year, sex is just over: Bonnard has risen from the hurlyburly of the bed to get a towel, leaving Marthe to lie back and play with the cats that have jumped up to take his place. No wonder Eric Fischl likes Bonnard.

Three years younger than his friend ToulouseLautrec, and two years older than his even greater friend Matisse, Bonnard claimed that he wanted "to take Impressionism further" and get more out of color than Renoir or Monet had done. To a great extent he succeeded in doing so, but these aspirations set him apart from the Parisian avant-garde—notably the Cubists—who were in violent reaction against Impressionism and regarded the 40-ish Bonnard as an anachronism. And who can altogether blame them?

By 1914 the revolutionary rigor and iconoclasm of Cubism must have made Bonnard's flashier paintings of the period (notably his 1908 portrait of Misia Sert) look as obsolete and froufrou as the cancan. Bonnard was far too perceptive not to be aware of this. He complained that modernism had whizzed past him and left him dangling. Picasso, who had been a principal cause of this development, dismissed Bonnard's sumptuous interiors and paradisiacal gardens as "cuisine" (cooked up) and "a potpourri of indecision"—a phrase that pinpoints the artist's less successful work all too accurately. Picasso would also jokingly suggest that he had caught his fear of melting in the bath like a piece of soap from Bonnard's paintings of his wife in the tub. There might be a touch of envy in these denunciations: gossamer was not Picasso's forte.

I, too, used to think along these lines. Bonnard's overly luscious orchestration left me feeling smothered in scented satin cushions, as a critic said of Richard Strauss's music. The color seemed so iridescent, the lighting so incandescent, and the compositions so modishly Japanese that it was tempting to dismiss his more self-indulgent work as art for art's sake. But the current exhibition, with its modernist premises and rigorous selection, reveals that Bonnard is a great deal more than the Colette of PostImpressionism. Some people may regret the lack of emphasis on the early period, when Bonnard played second fiddle to Edouard Vuillard. Others, including myself, will applaud the organizers for concentrating on the second half of his career, when he used his idiosyncratic sense of color, structure, and design to work all manner of tricks on our visual perceptions and make us see things afresh, albeit subtly askew.

Bonnard emerges from this exhibition as a distiller of genius. He enables us to savor his little world in essence much as the perfume distilleries of the Riviera enable us to savor in essence the jasmine and orange blossom growing on the hills behind the artist's villa. He also emerges as a tantalizing mystifier. Why, for instance, does he so frequently relegate a key element—usually an image of his passive-aggressive wife—to the periphery of a composition, where as often as not he chameleonizes it into virtual invisibility? A friend of mine who visited Bonnard's studio was surprised to see a gouache of the Nativity with the Holy Family shoved to the very edge of the paper. Elderfield's catalogue essay provides eye-opening answers to these questions and makes a persuasive case for accepting these and other quirks and anomalies as "the mark of Bonnard's radicalism, the defence against those who might think him a conservative."

Bonnard did not develop into a major modern master until he was in his mid-50s and in the throes of a six-year love affair which ended tragically in 1924. A beautiful young blonde named Renee Monchaty, who had been living with an American painter, became Bonnard's model and, later, his adored and adoring mistress. At some point, possibly during a trip to Rome in 1921, the two of them discussed marriage—something that Bonnard had never proposed to petite bourgeoise Marthe for fear of upsetting his haute bourgeoise family. In the end, Marthe put her frail little foot down and insisted that the engagement be broken off. Whereupon Renee obligingly committed suicide in a Paris hotel. It was Bonnard who found her body—supposedly in a bathtub. The scar caused by her death would never quite heal. In the last years of his life, 1945-47, he reworked a touching 1923 painting of his two loves: Renee in a dazzle of light, eclipsing Marthe, who is off in a shadowy corner.

A year after Renee's suicide, Bonnard finally married his "petite Marthe"—vo greatest secrecy: the news had to be kept from his family. At last he knew Marthe's real name and age, but he was still under the illusion that she was alone in the world. As much as their marriage, the death of Renee seems to have united the Bonnards once and for all in their folie a deux. From then on, the artist, who was also shy and reserved, was only too happy to share his wife's antisocial, invalidish regime. In the words of a friend, he "looked after her, feared her, put up with her, loved her." Their unpretentious homes—a rarely visited Paris studio, a house called Ma Roulotte (My Caravan), near Monet's Giverny, and a pink stuccoed villa at Le Cannet, near Cannes—became places of self-imposed exile from the world. For company there was a maid, a cat or two, and a dog called Ubu— no man, as a rule, except for the artist himself. When Marthe was not soaking in the tub, she did pastels of flowers and fruit and their beloved dog, which she signed Marthe Solange. According to Pierrette Vernon, who recently organized a show of her great-aunt's work in London, Marthe's pastels sold very well when they were first exhibited at the Galerie Druet in 1924. Her sensibility owes less to her husband than one might imagine.

The current exhibition reveals that Bonnard is a great deal more than the Colette of PostImpressionism.

Picasso jokingly suggested that he had caught his fear of melting in the bath like a piece of soap from Bonnard's paintings of his wife in the tub.

Since Marthe's health necessitated frequent trips to spas or sanatoriums or secluded villas in quiet, salubrious resorts, the Bonnards were often away for months on end. Wherever they went, they kept to themselves and seldom allowed the outside to impinge. Given his preference for tacking his canvas to the wall rather than using an easel, Bonnard did not need a studio. Nor did he need models, apart from his wife and himself—the subjects of what are, to my mind, his masterpieces. When their togetherness, which is reflected in so much of his work, became claustrophobic, the artist would tell Marthe he was taking the dog for a walk and escape to see the occasional woman friend and the fellow artists whom Marthe tended to distrust and whom he greatly missed, but he would always return to the wife who needed him as badly as he needed her.

The first of the great late paintings of Marthe in the tub date from the year of their marriage, when she was in her mid-50s and sick in body and soul. To judge by one of the few photographs of her to have survived, her looks had suffered. Lung disease had taken a toll, and her voice had become raucous. And yet, although the face in the tub paintings is often a mere blur (might these works memorialize the dead Renee as well as the living Marthe?), the slender, girlish body is as fresh as the peaches in the artist's famously appetizing still fifes. Bonnard has chosen to remember Marthe as she was in the early days of their relationship. As he wrote in his diary, "A work of art: a stopping of time."

After weeks of appalling trauma, Marthe finally died in January 1942. Bonnard, who had tended her with obsessive solicitude, was distraught. He would thenceforth keep her bedroom locked and forbid anyone to enter it. Work provided his only catharsis. Marthe makes a posthumous appearance in one or two paintings, including the great bathtub memento mori on the cover of the MoMA catalogue, but the most haunting works of these last years are the self -portraits, in which Bonnard looks flayed or scorched, as if by some nuclear flash, and at the same time amazingly ordinary—the consequence, perhaps, of a note he once made in his diary to "paint a man who looks like Mr. So-and-So."

Although the Bonnards' marriage agreement had stipulated a joint estate, Marthe never bothered to make a will leaving her share of their communal property to her husband. It was not until the authorities announced that they would have to lock up his studio and inventory the contents so that a declaration de succession could be made that Bonnard realized what this omission might entail. To protect his sacrosanct privacy, he did something that was not only illegal but also very stupid. He had a local lawyer draw up a phony will in which Marthe left everything to him. This he duly signed (in Marthe's name and his own undisguised writing) and dated nine months after her death. Since, as far as he knew, his wife had been alone in the world, Bonnard saw no harm in this deception. But it would come back to bedevil his heirs, for the lawyer he employed, a man by the name of Blanchardon, turned out to be a scoundrel, who set up the artist's estate for future pillage. Even more ominous, the lawyer was in cahoots with an equally unscrupulous local dealer— the up-and-coming Aime Maeght—who had wormed his way into Bonnard's and Matisse's favor during World War II by bartering black-market butter and eggs from his wife's family's dairy business for their work.

Bonnard died in 1947, almost five years to the day after Marthe. He believed that he had left his enormously valuable estate to the offspring of his brother, who had settled in Algiers, and of his sister, Andree Terrasse, whose son Charles was the leading expert on his work and the apple of his eye. Within days of the artist's death, Maeght went into action; aided by Blanchardon, he tried, with short-lived success, to drive a wedge between the eminently respectable Terrasses and their cousins in Algiers. The latter had better get him to look after their interests, Maeght said; otherwise the Terrasses might take advantage of them. Meanwhile, the Terrasses had authorized as their representative a well-established modernist dealer named Louis Carre, who was also an old and trusted friend of the Bonnard family's. Carre helped stave off the depredations of Maeght, who lost no time in "sequestering" 300 paintings from the artist's studio. When obliged to return them, he pretended that there were only 150. Maeght was soon unmasked, but he did not lose hope of controlling the Bonnard estate. He and Blanchardon still had Marthe's fake will up their sleeve.

After the fake will was disclosed, both parties took steps to find out whether Marthe had left any relatives. Blanchardon hired a genealogist, who had no difficulty in coming up with four middle-aged nieces, including two spinsters who lived in Paris (one of them is still alive at the age of 101)—daughters of a sister of Marthe's and an English-born inventor, Adolphe Bowers. The Bowers sisters had never heard of Bonnard and knew virtually nothing of their aunt's fife, but the moment they laid hands on a book about him, they realized that he must indeed have been the husband of their aunt Maria Boursin and that they were going to be very, very rich.

At first the Bowers sisters agreed to negotiate with Bonnard's heirs, but the more they learned about the legal issues and the amount of money at stakehundreds of millions of dollars at today's prices—the more demanding they became. And instead of being content with the prospect of inheriting their aunt Marthe's share, they went after the entire estate on the grounds that, under French law, "any spouse who diverts or conceals effects belonging to a joint estate is deprived of his share of the said effects." The Bonnard/Terrasse family were appalled at the prospect of forfeiting their birthright to outsiders, whose existence Marthe had never divulged—the more so since these outsiders would be beholden to the treacherous Maeght. Nor was it simply a question of money. The guardianship of their uncle's treasures was in the nature of a sacred trust, which must not be allowed to fall into hands other than their own.

Litigation lasted for 16 years. The first round went against the Terrasses. They stood to lose everything. However, their silver-tongued lawyer, the celebrated Maurice Gargon, won an appeal. The Bowerses fought back, whereupon both sides geared up for a prolonged battle. In the end, the artist's designated heirs were vindicated to the extent that they were awarded 62.5 percent of the works painted before Marthe's death (the remaining 37.5 percent went to the Bowerses) as well as all the works painted after her death.

According to the March 28, 1963, edition of the newspaper Le Monde, the partitioning of Bonnard's 600 paintings and 4,000 drawings and watercolors took place over six weeks in the Chase bank's Paris headquarters. The beneficiaries drew straws for the various lots; whoever got the short straw won. As Michel Conil Lacoste, Le Monde's art critic, recounted, 150 paintings were of top quality, 150 were of lesser importance, 150 were sketches, and 150 were simply unworthy of the artist. A number of croquis and working drawings were destroyed. Some of the unfinished oil sketches are rumored to have been finished at a later date.

Again according to Le Monde, the legal costs were so heavy that the beneficiaries were obliged to liquidate a large part of their holdings. Parisian dealers gathered around like so many vultures. Maeght may have triggered this whole Balzacian business, but he profited little from his deviousness, for he had quarreled with the Bowerses. The sisters had recourse to other outlets, not least in New York, where dealers were prepared to pay higher prices than in Europe. The Acquavellas—father and son—acquired enough paintings from the Bowerses to put on a beautiful small show at their gallery in 1964. It was a sellout, and it boosted Bonnard's prices as well as his name.

As for the Terrasses, they disposed of most of their holdings. A substantial part went to Louis Carre's American associate, Charles Zadok, an art speculator as well as a vice president of Gimbel's department store. The Terrasses would also eventually forgive their former foe Maeght. He had become an extremely powerful dealer, and in view of his wartime friendship with Bonnard and the fact that he had organized a show of the artist's work at his foundation in the South of France, the Terrasses let him have some major works.

However, the lion's share of the Terrasses' holdings went to the world's most formidable art dealers, Wildenstein's. As a result, the gallery has dominated the Bonnard market ever since. Unfortunately, the Wildenstein firm's suitability as a guardian of Bonnard's flame would come under scrutiny. On June 30, 1967, Alfred Ayrton, a British metal trader and broker by profession, who lived in Paris but operated out of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, brought a lawsuit in New York against Daniel Wildenstein, the head of the firm, for commissions which he claimed were owed him. According to Ayrton's complaint, Wildenstein had failed to pay him $500,000 on the $5 million sale of Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci from the Prince of Liechtenstein's collection to Paul Mellon for donation to the National Gallery.

In a second, related claim, Ayrton stated that he had performed additional services for Wildenstein's for a value of $75,000, and that in lieu of payment he had agreed to accept a Bonnard painting of the Place de la Concorde worth an equivalent amount. Ayrton contended that, although this painting had come directly from the artist's estate, it had started life as "a preliminary rough sketch on canvas by Bonnard, over which there had been painted by a person or persons unknown a complete work in the style of Bonnard." Hence, Ayrton's claim that a valueless "forgery" had been foisted off on him. Since all the paintings in the artist's studio, finished or unfinished, had been photographed, this point was easy enough to verify.

The defendant's lawyers denied Ayrton's charges and took the line that he was owed no commission whatsoever, either on the Leonardo deal (which Wildenstein maintained he had done pro bono) or on various other deals which were cited ("the Trujillo affair," "the Van Dongen affair," "the Samuel Montagu flotation," "the proposed exhibition at the Villa Hugel"). Wildenstein's lawyers insisted that Place de la Concorde "was a gift from him personally [to Ayrton] rather than compensation for plaintiff's fruitless endeavors in the art field." The plaintiff, it seemed, should not have looked this gift horse in the mouth, even if it came from the owner of one of the world's greatest racing stables.

It was Bonnard who found his mistress Renees body— supposedly in a bathtub.

The outline of the case is set out in the plaintiff's complaints and the defendant's replies, which are on file in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. After the case was settled out of court, the participants and their lawyers were subject to a confidentiality agreement, so we may never know whether the contrast between the beforeand after-"restoration" photographs of the Place de la Concorde painting is as disturbing as that between the beforeand after-surgery shots of Jocelyne Wildenstein, Daniel's daughter-in-law, who posed so memorably in "the Bonnard Room" of the Wildensteins' New York mansion for the March issue of Vanity Fair.