Moving on

BONNARD: Peindre L’Arcadie

It was my last day in Paris, the free time after the air show coverage (more a junket but I welcomed it). S suggested Musee d’Orsay and I saw that Bonnard (Peindre L’Arcadie) was on exhibit. I know that it was home to the other impressionists but I was only after Bonnard, whom Mary Gordon introduced me in her “Still Life,” which I re-read writing this. The ideas and connections she made between her mother’s life (of memorylessness) and Bonnard’s paintings.

We went to D’Orsay with dejected me. I just lost my cellphone to skillful pickpockets and my enthusiasm to see Bonnard was dampened by less of the loss but more of the sense of violation and victimization I felt. I had to shake it off. “The sooner you shake it off, the sooner you can move on” was a traveling companion’s earlier unrelated suggestion to another in a conversation on lost loves.

The line was long. S found a way for us to skip the line: She’s a journalist, pointing to me. I showed them my press card and we were let in. But the museum banned backpacks and I was getting attached to my things, particularly my passport and wallet. With much internal struggle to enjoy the rest of the day, I went in with S.

Such a gorgeous structure, with its huge clocks, ornate steel bars, and glass ceilings: D’Orsay. There was another line to the rooms for Bonnard. I was prepared to be taken to his world.

It must be the crowd but I felt insufficiently reverent before his paintings. This is after all my first actual encounter with Bonnard. I wanted the Mary Gordon experience, but I was more captivated by the texts on his personal life scattered throughout the exhibition area. His mistress’ suicide particularly. For someone who has contemplated it and decided that suicide is the option for when the pain seems unbearable (although I’ve also learned that pain eases and suicide is too painful to inflict on those who love me).

I looked for the whites in his paintings, as Mary Gordon had noted Bonnard’s fascination for it. And I discovered his bursts of happy hues of yellows, oranges, and blues. S pointed out not only how his wife Marthe is his model for most of the paintings, but also of the cats that were also among the most ubiquitous in them.

I like the impressionists because of the blurring of borders, as if I wasn’t wearing my eyeglasses. Like memories, fuzzy. Like being drunk, or on a boat for a long time, or experiencing jetlag, your head floating.

I did not buy any Bonnard books after. We went to the see Monet, Manet, Cezanne, and Degas at the top floors. You can have too much beauty. But the dejection has lifted. I’m glad I moved on quickly.

The church on the mountain: Sacre Couer, was on our itinerary, but we were exhausted. That would be for another time. There will be another time.

We went back to my hotel to get my things, go to the R’s, have an Algerian dinner near their place, and get a two-hour sleep before leaving for Berlin, where I headed to alone to go see the wall.

(from 28 June 2015, actually an email to a friend)