Pierre Bonnard.

From 1923 until his death, Pierre Bonnard painted and drew in his home in the south of France. "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors" (through April 19) collects 80 paintings, drawings and watercolors. Intensely disliked by Picasso, who famously complained that Bonnard "never goes beyond his own sensibility," our artist had nothing to do with cubism, dada, surrealism, or abstract expressionism, the movements that transformed the art world during the twilight years of his long lifetime. By the end of this period, he seemed a figure from the distant past, those impressionist or post-impressionist eras of his youth. Woman with Basket of Fruit from 1915-18 or 1926 (dating his paintings is tricky) has an obvious affinity with Paul Gauguin's art.

Bonnard's friend Henri Matisse, who possessed a totally different sensibility, is often cited as an influence on late-modernist American painting. Bonnard is not. You need only compare his Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46) with Matisse's Nice paintings and drawings to understand the validity of that claim. Look, if you visit this exhibition, at Matisse's The Three O'Clock Sitting (1924) on display conveniently nearby in the Met. In Nice, Matisse often depicts himself (or some surrogate, like the model working in Three O'Clock Sitting) creating the very picture we view. Bonnard, by contrast, never shows himself working here. The only exception is Self-Portrait (1938-40), where the mirror reflection shows him cleaning his brushes before a background cupboard that looks like a canvas frame. Matisse presents the activity of art making, while Bonnard is more concerned with representing the act of perception.

This basic distinction between the active Matisse and the passive Bonnard tells us how to situate this exhibition. The golden interior in Bonnard's The Breakfast Table (1936) envelops two women in a luminous color field. Where Matisse foregrounds sexy models, even when they are set before glorious decorative fabrics, Bonnard shows his women without regard for their charms. Here, for example, the head of the woman in the back overlaps visually with the figure at the table, who appears absorbed in drinking her tea, but no vital connection is established between them or the viewer. What then is erotic in a Bonnard is not the individual figures but the entire picture, with its sexy colors and soft textures. So it is hardly surprising that Matisse painted from the live model while Bonnard worked from memory. And that contrast explains, also, why Matisse's concern with the process of art making links him to the future, especially Jackson Pollock as famously photographed by Hans Namuth. Bonnard's passivity, by contrast, did not inspire any heirs. Like Matisse, to continue my comparison, Bonnard loves mirrors. But where The Toilette (Nude at the Mirror) (1931) shows his wife Marthe standing before a mirror, Matisse typically uses mirrors to bring the working artist into the picture. And so in the Nice pictures, he presents his working studio, while Bonnard only shows living spaces. In the great White Interior (1932), the dominant whites of the door, radiator, walls, and tabletop play against the red of the floor, where we find Marthe and her cat. There is no visual evidence that this is an artist's house.

Nowadays artists dealing in the phenomenology of perception are mostly interested in mass media, appropriating advertising, film or television images. Because he was born in 1867, Bonnard comes from a very different visual culture. He uses high-pitched oranges, reds and violets to depict people dining or reading introspectively, rarely interacting; flowers and still life fruit on table settings; domestic animals; and occasional, outdoor views through a window, as in Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1930-31). The blue carpet in Work Table (1926/37), with the white cat in the background, is shocking because he temporarily abandons his usual palette. Rarely does Bonnard show solid forms, like this rug. His luminous world is as transient as Watteau's, another Frenchman who presented a difficult era of transition, in an era when nothing seemed visually reliable. Bonnard was much depressed in old age. France was occupied and then Marthe, his neurotic, needy muse died. In 1940, he made a curious statement: "I'm afraid that painting may abandon me because of a lack of mental freedom." Here again, we see his essential passivity. But he didn't need to worry, for he remained great until the very end.

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Viewing the Met show in the determinedly dreary Robert Lehman Wing, the least Bonnard-esque site imaginable, is off-putting. You need to practice tunnel vision, avoiding the nasty concrete walls, keeping your eyes fixed on the luminous pictures. And the catalogue, which has smart essays, is unnecessarily defensive. Why, it asks, is Bonnard not given due attention nowadays? None who comes uptown from Chelsea, with its installations and video art and so much bad painting, will take that question seriously. As for me, once I recalled seeing the equally magnificent Giorgio Morandi show just last month in this same setting, I ceased to worry about the place of these two great artists in the canon.