Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

Painted in April-May 1890, La Revue or L’Exercice is among Bonnard’s very first, fully realized statements of the synthétiste, anti-naturalist approach to picture-making that he and his fellow Nabis had been promulgating since autumn 1888, when Paul Sérusier returned to the Académie Julian in Paris with a pocket-sized landscape that he had produced at Pont-Aven under Gauguin’s revolutionary tutelage. “Thus was introduced to us for the first time, in a paradoxical and unforgettable form, the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” recounted Maurice Denis, the unofficial spokesman of the Nabi circle, who took their name from a Hebrew word meaning prophet. “Thus we learned that every work of art was a transposition, a passionate equivalent of a sensation received” (“Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” Art et Critique, 1890; in H.B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 101).
This singular, early canvas records Bonnard’s obligatory period of army service at age 22, as a soldat de deuxième classe in the 52nd infantry regiment stationed at Bourgoin, near Lyon. Although his father was a high-ranking official in the War Ministry, Bonnard was a reluctant conscript. One must remember, he wrote from the barracks, that one is more than “a number on the regimental roll and that one once led a life different than that of a brute” (quoted in R. Thomson, op. cit., 2005, p. 218). Here, he exploited the interlocking color planes and unconventional cropping of Nabi technique to convey his subjective experience of the military. The viewer is given the vantage point of a soldier in the ranks, looking over his comrades’ shoulders to the sergeant and another file behind him. The uniformed soldiers are rendered in repeated, flat patches of red and blue, obscuring their individuality and evoking the discipline and pageantry of regimental life.
“By 1890 Bonnard had successfully assimilated the influence of Gauguin’s pared-down, color-rich style,” Colta Ives has written. “L’Exercice, which presents its subject in exemplary decorative array... is a brilliant demonstration of the brand-new abstracted art” (op. cit., 1989, pp. 7-9). Bonnard’s grand-nephew Antoine Terrasse has identified this breakthrough canvas as one of six works—five easel paintings and a multi-panel screen—that the artist exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in spring 1891, his public début on the Parisian stage (op. cit., 2000, p. 20).