Bonnard’s The Pushcart (c.1897)
Bonnard, The Pushcart (c.1897) Color Lithograph from the suite Quelques Aspects de la vie de Paris, 1899. Metropolitan Museum, New York.
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In a previous article, Bonnard's Salon des Cent (1896), it was shown how the French artist indicates his self-representation in a dog by forming its legs into his own initials. He did likewise in this contemporary lithograph, The Pushcart, which may look like a street scene in his beloved Paris, but is instead a pathway through his own mind. Here's how.
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Top and lower L: Details of Bonnard's The Pushcart
Lower R: Diagram of a detail above, inverted
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The dog's forelegs (top) resemble the letter P for Pierre with the paw bent at the ankle like the stem of the P in his monogram (lower left). The B for Bonnard is, however, inverted into the negative space between its legs. The hidden, bi-directional "monogram" suggests a mirror-reflection, which is what this print is all about: both a reflection on the creative process, and the inversion natural to printing.
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Bonnard's The Pushcart with inset photograph of David Hockney drawing on a lithographic stone (1973). Photo by Dan Freeman.
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Perhaps the cleverest detail is the way Bonnard re-imagined drawing on a lithographic stone. Compare the old man pushing the cart to David Hockney at work on a similar stone (inset). The trapezoid-shape resembles how a lithographer sees a stone when working close to its surface. The old man is really Bonnard's imagination of himself pushing his crayon forward across the surface of his actual stone. He, then young, represents himself as old because, as in so much other art, the elderly are wise.
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Top L: Detail of Bonnard's The Pushcart
Top R: Photographic detail of Bonnard's face (c.1900)
Lower L: Doagram of detail above
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With the scene re-imagined, it may be easier to see that the scene, as so often, secretes his facial features too.1 His oval eyes emerge from the eyelid-awnings with the man's black cap, perhaps, as a wayward "pupil". This links the man's head (mind) with Bonnard's eye (vision).2 The obelisk of the woman's torso is his "nose" with her head between his "eyes", as if his muse.3 Note too a perspectival problem: that even though the man moves behind her she looks as though she can see him, their figures impossibly linked. Such "inconsistencies", not errors, hint at the creative thought behind the natural scene.
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Top L: Detail of Bonnard's The Pushcart
Top R: Photograph of Bonnard c. 1890, detail
Lower L: Diagram of detail above
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Mental images, according to both Mozart and Beethoven, contain multiple views of the same form.4 So, it is natural that Bonnard's "face" should appear abstractly again. To the left of the shopfront his pyramidal nose is once more a woman, with windows for his eyes.
Bonnard, like other visual philosophers, turned the mental and physical process involved in making the composition into an allegory of his creative life.
For a very similar example see the entry on Rembrandt's The Hog (1643).
More Works by Bonnard
Notes:
1. Art historians are, as far as I know, completely unaware that Bonnard's features appear in, I would estimate, nearly every image he created. Of the many I have inspected he appears in at least nine out of ten. Other examples already published on EPPH are Bonnard's Woman with a Umbrella (1895), Salon des Cent (1896) and After the Bath (1910).
2. If you squint while looking at the print or stand further away, the black cap can be seen as the "pupil" of Bonnard's "eye" even though it seems, on close inspection, to have dropped out of it.
3. The woman's head, above and in between Bonnard's "eyes", is located in the spot where Renaissance artists would indicate an "inner eye" within the mind. Bonnard did something similar in a contemporaneous print Woman with an Umbrella (1895). He located the circular handle of an umbrella representing his "inner eye" above his real ones.
4. Major artists and others have access to levels of their mind that we, less sensitive types, are rarely, if ever, aware of. We have thoughts which we then perceive in words, music, or images; they can visualize the thought process itself before thoughts become words, music or images. Mozart said that on completing a long composition he could: "survey it, like a fine picture or beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once." Mozart's comparison of a mental image to a work of art that can be seen from all sides simultaneously must be accurate because Beethoven described his thought in similar terms: "...In my head, I begin to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height, and its depth, and as I am aware of what I want to do, the underlying idea never deserts me. It rides, it grows up. I hear and see the image in front of me from every angle, as if it had been cast..." [italics added]. For more on mental images, see Cubism Explained (30 Oct. 2011). “Mozart: A Letter” in Brewster Ghiselin, The Creative Process (New York: The New American Library) 1952, p.45; Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, ed. M. Hamburger (New York: Pantheon Books) 1952, p. 195, cited in Albert Rothenberg, “Homospatial Thinking in Creativity”, Archives of General Psychiatry 33, 1976, p.20.
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