The Blue Hour in Pierre Bonnard

(Picture: Gallimard Catherine Hélie)

(Picture: centrepompidou.fr)

(1.11.2022) This contribution to our History of the Blue Hour is also meant to be a tribute to the beautiful – once televised – journey into the history of painting, which is known as the Palettes series, and which was authored – in a personal, informed, intelligent, dedicated and subtle style – by Alain Jaubert. For beginners I’d like to recommend the episode on Andy Warhol’s Ten Lizes to start with. And someone who will return to that very episode, after having become hungry for all the other episodes, and after having watched all the other episodes, will realize that the Ten Lizes episode also subtly comes back to earlier episodes (on Raphael) as well as it interacts with later ones (on Manet). Here we like to draw the attention of our readers to what Alain Jaubert did when analysing the The Studio at Le Cannet with Mimosa (1939-46) by Pierre Bonnard. Because what he did is also a beautiful example of what televisual, cinematic means are capable of contributing to art history (as well as to the history of the blue hour and – more generally – to the history of light).

The painting by Pierre Bonnard, as Alain Jaubert is expounding in his analysis, is dedicated to the time of day, when natural as well as artificial light seem roughly to be equally bright, and this is the time of dusk (or twilight). What may not be obvious at first sight is the fact that the painting by Bonnard not only does show a window view, but that it also does partly show the interior of Bonnard’s studio, which is artificially lighted. We may say that this painting does simulate a balance between artificial and natural light, which is also not that obvious, since the mimosa are very bright.
But by means of television Jaubert is capable of showing how the painting might have looked, if Bonnard would have chosen a slightly earlier time of day, because the interior – without artificial light – would have seemed darker, due to intense natural light coming in from the window.

(Picture: youtube.com; Palettes)

And if Bonnard would have chosen a somewhat later moment, with dusk having more developed towards actual nightfall, the balance of the painting would also have been a different one:

(Picture: youtube.com; Palettes)

With night finally having fallen (as in the end of the two acts of Waiting for Godot), we are able to detect, due to the televisual simulation of all the stages of the blue hour, how artificial light (producing warm colors) is combined – in the original painting – with natural light as well as with the intrinsic light (as one may say) of the mimosa.

(Picture: youtube.com; Palettes)

Pierre Bonnard, thus, does show here as a painter who was intensely meditating on the balance of artificial and natural light at time of dusk, which, within the history of (French) painting, may be seen as a position between Cézanne (who is known to rather have disliked gaz light as well as electric light) and Sonia Delaunay (who passionately welcomed electric lighting, as well as she studied the abstract paintings a sky may offer – paintings who – obviously – refer to no represented subjects at all, and this long before humans discovered that they could do this as well, calling it simply ›abstractions‹).

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