Longing & loss: Pierre Bonnard at MOMA.

When New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) presented its first exhibition of Pierre Bonnard in 1948, just a year after the artist's death, the catalogue described him as an artist who "wished to paint only happy paintings." The description was ready to hand, what with the artist's shimmering landscapes, warm interiors, gorgeous still lifes, and sensuous nudes. Bonnard's opaline, deliquescent palette seemed to have carried Impressionism into the twentieth century and on, almost to its midpoint.

But there were critics as well. Soon after Bonnard's death, Christian Zervos, writing for Cahiers d'Art, echoed Picasso's hostile views in an article titled "Is Pierre Bonnard a Great Painter?" (Matisse angrily wrote over his own copy, "Yes. I certify that Pierre Bonnard is a great painter.") Even more important, the artist's precise intentions and range of achievement remained puzzling to critics and public alike.

Now a dazzling show at MOMA, first presented in a somewhat larger and different format at the Tate Gallery in London, sets out to set the record straight. Curated by Sarah Whitfield at the Tate and by John Elderfield at MOMA, this is not the "modern master" retrospective accorded to Picasso or Matisse, Mondrian or Miro. But it will surely go far toward establishing that Bonnard is indeed a great painter, if a highly unusual and particular one. As a visual experience, it is simply unforgettable. ("Bonnard" will remain at MOMA through October 13. Its catalogue [Bonnard, Abrams, $60, 270 pp.], with lavish reproductions of the eighty works shown in New York as well as others from London, is edited by Whitfield and contains essays by her and Elderfield.)

Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1867, Bonnard attended school there, spending holidays with his family at his paternal grandfather's house in the village of Le Grand-Lemps. He enrolled in both the Faculty of Law and the Academie Julian in Paris, where he met a group of young painters who came under the influence of Paul Gauguin. Giving themselves the name Nabis (Hebrew for prophet), they espoused a purely pictorial, decorative style. Bonnard's Intimacy (1891) is a perfect small example of the flat, all-over, coloristically adventurous approach he took as a young artist; he depicted his sister and brother-in-law smoking together in a highly compressed space, out of which the artist's own clay pipe and hand only gradually emerge for the viewer's eye. The Croquet Game, a year later, is a larger and still more impressive example. It presents the reverie of a family afternoon in which greens, browns, and gold suffuse a lawn where pattern has become more important than perspective. The intimisme of the 1890s eventually included over fifty pictures of the artist's family: "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world, the picture," Bonnard said late in his life. "One may imagine such an artist spending a great deal of time doing nothing but looking around himself and inside himself."

It was during the 1890s that the pivotal event of Bonnard's personal life occurred, his meeting Maria Boursin on a Paris street in 1893. They eventually married in 1925, after almost thirty years together. "Marthe" gradually appears in more and more paintings, such as the apparently erotic nudes Indolence (1898) and Siesta (1900), and eventually figures in over 380 of Bonnard's works.

When one comes upon Man and Woman (1900), the plot thickens. Here a man (the artist) and a woman (Marthe) are presented on either side of the vertical canvas, shortly after intercourse. He stands naked and seems to be reaching for something like a bathrobe. Likewise naked, she sits on the bed, fondling one of two kittens. Between them, and running almost the entire height of the picture, is a screen which represents a seemingly insuperable barrier - or, perhaps, as one critic has observed, the tree in the garden under which Adam and Eve sinned. This puzzling, imperfect, poignant work is an interpretive key for all that follows: The supposed hedonist who painted the savor of sensuous intimacy was in fact always somehow estranged from the object of desire.

Curiously, for a colorist of his caliber, it was only after the turn of the century that Bonnard rediscovered Impressionism. With others of his generation, he valued the movement's freshness, informality, and realism. But he wanted to surpass it as regards composition and, still more, the play of color. Two beautifully paired paintings from 1908 present Bonnard at his shimmering best. The Bathroom Mirror, all cool blue and gray, shows a washstand with a mirror above it that reflects a small child at a table holding a teacup and the torso of a lush nude drying herself after the bath. Just slightly larger, The Bathroom moves the viewer back from the same washstand to reveal half of the bedroom in which a tawny nude stands after her bath, beside a dazzling pink bed and before a lace-covered window of golden light. The mirror now reflects a frontal view of the woman. The treatment of space makes no effort at rigorous perspective - and yet yields it. The range of color is astonishing, the play of light even more so. Each painting, and especially the two together, perfectly represent what Bonnard meant when he said that he wished "to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden," and that the work of art is "a stopping of time." Not a moment in time, as in classical Impressionism. Rather, a stopping of time.

But time can be held still only in memory. Shortly before World War I, Bonnard took painful stock of his previous work and began to move in another direction. Now his decentered, multifocused vision, as Pierre Schneider has described it, becomes more pronounced, as does the play and counterplay of center and periphery in his canvases.

In Bonnard's still lifes from the 1920s onward, the opulent treatment of ordinary subjects can be savored only through the multiple perspectives of a viewer's actively searching gaze. The famous Provencal Jug (1930), for all its rich color and dancing light, reveals its full mystery only as one's eye gradually moves to inspect the arm at the right edge of the canvas - and is amazed to find that now the jug with its bouquet, in peripheral vision, has taken on three-dimensional volume. Still more dazzling is Basket of Fruit on a Table in the Garden at Le Cannet (ca. 1944), with its golden grapes and red cherries in an earthenware jug on a tabletop that might have been painted by Monet in Giverny. Here the sheer lushness of the work's color makes its sketchily represented three-dimensionality tilt directly forward into the viewer's space - just as Matisse was discovering new ways to let color bring a picture frontally toward the viewer at the same time.

In 1926, Bonnard bought a hillside villa at Le Cannet, a small town above Cannes. He called it Le Bosquet. There he painted panoramic views of the town, the verdant hills, and lush scenes from his garden. He reveled in the natural disorder of nature, using an almost unlimited range of markings to evoke it, much as did van Gogh. One wall in the gallery devoted to landscapes is particularly mesmerizing. In Almond Tree in Blossom (1946-7), the tree seems to be blooming before our eyes. Landscape with Red Roofs (1945-6) presents an almost paradisiacal vision as seen from the bathroom window at Le Bosquet.

There is a similar interplay of warm domestic shelter opening out into a visionary, almost primeval nature in Bonnard's interiors - for some the height of his achievement. If any part of the MOMA exhibition could have been expanded to its profit (apart from including the artist's drawings), more interiors would have been my choice. Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-5) is here, as is Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room) of 1930-1. What seems at first a straightforward scene of a bountifully laden breakfast table before a window which opens onto a garden and finally to a public square, reveals itself as somehow blocked, unattainable: imagined more than inhabited. Here the distant garden carries forward the reversal of emotional expectation that first saw Man and Woman as erotic and the later The Earthly Paradise (1916-20) as Edenic, when each in fact equally represents threat and estrangement.

The climax of the exhibition is the large gallery of bathing nudes (Marthe) followed by a smaller gallery of the remarkable late paintings of her lying immersed in her bath. These depictions show the early influence of Degas, though without his often strained poses, and the nudes are generally shown in relaxed, easy poses in increasingly complex interiors. The Bathroom (1932) was painted at Le Bosquet. The room was walled in white ceramic tiles and had a linoleum floor-covering with blue and white lozenge pattern. But the 5 o'clock afternoon light (as we verify from a clock on the washstand) brings the gleaming white bathtub on the left side of the painting into harmony with white tiles there, while a rosy rectangular form on the right (perhaps a small cot) is paired with tiles that now turn blue and violet. A rainbow curtain hangs behind the iridescent body of Marthe, whose right breast reflects the white light from the bathtub. The color of this painting delights every eye that looks on it, but only gradually does one realize how complex the interplay of color and light is, how it seduces our vision continuously back and forth throughout the painting. Here is a canvas worthy of comparison with any other in the century, and indeed with any of the great nudes or bathers in the history of art.

The painter is occasionally represented in these bathing scenes, through an intruding knee or pair of hands. But he is always an implied presence in the compelling scenes of Marthe lying in her bath. Nude in the Bath and Small Dog, begun before Marthe's death in 1942 and worked on until just before Bonnard's own death, shows the ageless woman lying in water up to her neck, the bathtub surrealistically reflecting the contours of her body as the tiled walls and lozenge-patterned floor are transformed into a glittering mosaic. Touchingly, and with perhaps too obvious pathos, the Bonnards' pet dog, Ubu, sits loyally on a small mat just before the tub. This scene, as John Elderfield has pointed out, represents the culmination of Bonnard's career, a magisterial portrayal in elegiac tones of remembered intimacy longed for and lost.

The exhibition ends with nine of the dozen or so known self-portraits. The earliest shows Bonnard as a very young, nearsighted and somewhat frightened young man, equally alert and apprehensive. In The Boxer (1931), he seems to be the naked figure of futility registered in acid yellow with characteristically pink hands. Three final canvases from 1943 to 1946 can only be said to be harrowing.

The great achievement of Bonnard's art, as Elderfield has argued, is to draw the viewer into the perception of a remembered moment in time which tells a story only insofar as the viewer explores that shimmering memory. Working directly from nature was too overpowering for the artist, he confessed, and so he painted from memory. Late in life he noted: "I have all my subjects to hand. I go to see them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before painting I reflect, I dream."

How far this is from an easy extension of Impressionism, or simply a ravishingly decorative, symbolist art, must now be clear. In a characteristically modern way, Bonnard uses the most ordinary subjects to express the ambiguity and inner irresolution of contemporary experience. The contradiction of shimmering surface and stilled emotion seems by the end of the exhibition to have been at work from its beginning. Drawn back again and again to canvases of seductive beauty, we come to see them as lyrics of intimacy desired but unattained.

Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J., is the president of Georgetown University.