‘Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory’ at Tate Modern

‘Le Boxeur’ (‘The Boxer’) (1931), oil on canvas, 54 x 74.3cm: Come and have a go if you think you’re (Bonn)ard enough…

Tate Modern is really pulling in the crowds with its new show, ‘Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory’: it’s looking as if they may well have another monster Hockney-sized hit on their hands. Instantloveland braved the lunchtime crush for a close inspection of the hundred-plus works on display; and came away thinking that while he might have not have looked like anyone’s idea of a heavyweight contender, Bonnard packed one hell of a punch in terms of colour. For sheer edge-to-edge richness, it’s hard to think of anyone to match him in the first half of the twentieth century.

Still, that richness comes with a hefty price tag: there’s a cloistered sultriness to Bonnard’s earthly paradise, and the air in these bedrooms and kitchens is thick and heavy with nostalgia, embedded in the paint by the months and sometimes years that he worked and re-worked these remembered scenes of bourgeois family life. The mood- always suffused with yearning, even at lunchtime around the sunlit dining table- turns anguished and morbid in the late self-portraits: the strokes and dabs of colour that captured the midday heat of the South of France here seem to be embalming the artist’s image in the bathroom mirror as we watch.

Great show: but after thirteen rooms of Bonnard, Instantloveland was ready for the great outdoors, and a refreshing blast of freezing January air, coming in fast and low off the Thames…