Any exhibition of work by Pierre Bonnard, wrote one critic on the French website Arthive, is “a story of Pierre and Marthe – a very private one”. Bonnard, who was born into an upper middle-class family and trained to be a lawyer while he took art classes on the side, met Maria Boursin – her real name, which she was clearly keen to leave behind – as she got off a horse-drawn omnibus in 1893. He was 26 and already making a name for himself as an artist with the Nabis group; she was 24, but told him she was 16.

Maria was poor; she had come to Paris from the country some years before and worked making silk flowers in a funeral accessories shop. He asked her to pose for him, as he sometimes did when he saw a potential model. She agreed. They went to his studio, where he did some drawings and they had sex for the first time.

It was a swipe-right start – although the Tinder generation’s promiscuity pales beside the abandoned sexual mores of the Belle Epoque – to a relationship that would withstand illness, madness, his infidelities and her lies. They would remain together until her death in 1942, during which she appeared in around 400 of his paintings and many more drawings. Even after she died, he went on including her in his paintings, most of which were domestic interiors and scenes of their garden.

Pierre Bonnard, The red blouse (Marthe Bonnard), 1925 (detail).

Pierre Bonnard, The red blouse (Marthe Bonnard), 1925 (detail).Credit: Musee d’Orsay

When he drew other models, as he did all his life, they usually ended up looking like Marthe, his mind’s eye blending the pose sketched in the studio with the woman who dominated his imagination. Thirty are included in the exhibition simply titled Pierre Bonnard opening next week at the National Gallery of Victoria. Marthe appeared in the kitchen, in bars, swimming, sleeping or unself-consciously scrubbing herself in the bath. None of these were portraits, as the writer Julian Barnes observed. Bonnard was not painting his companion’s likeness or her character, but her constant presence.

Pierre Bonnard, Marthe seated on a bed, seen from the back, 1899–1900.

Pierre Bonnard, Marthe seated on a bed, seen from the back, 1899–1900.Credit: Musée d’Orsay, Paris

What does it mean to be an artist’s muse? From the first day of their relationship, the woman formerly known as Maria lied about herself. She called herself Marthe de Meligny, a name she may have cooked up on the spot; she claimed wealthy Italian origins, fallen on hard times; most poignantly, she said she was an orphan. For decades, Bonnard had no idea she had a mother and sisters; for her part, she probably never met his family.

What was the point? The class gulf between them was obvious; marriage was out of the question. Even friends in his artistic circle, who would have considered themselves bohemian free spirits, wrote that she was coarsely spoken and overdressed; she was also often ill, probably with a recurrent variety of tuberculosis. Later, she shunned social contact and was seen to make him into a hermit too. Even in recent decades, when critical fashion militated against discussing artists’ biographies, Marthe retained her reputation as a difficult, manipulative woman who kept Bonnard on a short leash.

Miranda Wallace, co-curator of the new exhibition, says she takes that view with several grains of salt. Marthe’s detractors often had their own agenda. “Starting with Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard’s artist friend from the 1890s, who disliked her because she interfered with their straight art talk. There are a lot of these views. But if you look at her presence in his work, they were so co-dependent as a creative couple that you can’t dissociate her from his work,” she says.

Pierre Bonnard, Coffee, 1915.

Pierre Bonnard, Coffee, 1915.Credit: © Tate

Bonnard’s oeuvre was almost entirely about the private domestic space – Marthe’s space – where he painted the same objects over and over again. “I think what makes Bonnard distinctive is what he’s showing, that idea of being inside looking out on the world,” says Wallace. Painting a small repertory of subjects, he could explore colour and form within another confined space – the canvas – without having to think about anything external. Every year, he said, the almond tree in their garden in Le Cannet on the French Riviera where he lived with Marthe for almost 40 years, “called out” to him to paint it when it burst into blossom. Marthe called out to him in the same way.

A week ago, I was on the French Riviera for the Cannes Film Festival, a short bus ride from Le Cannet. There is now a Musee Bonnard in their hometown, which is currently showing an exhibition of Marthe’s artwork. She made work for only five years, from 1921 until 1926. Why she started drawing – she used pastels on paper – and why she stopped is very much a biographical question, according to the museum’s curator, Veronique Serrano.

Pierre Bonnard, from left, Marthe in the bath, c. 1908; The bath (second version) c. 1924 lithograph.

Pierre Bonnard, from left, Marthe in the bath, c. 1908; The bath (second version) c. 1924 lithograph. Credit: Musee d’Orsay, NGA

“There is a little theory,” says Serrano. “The work appeared as quickly as it disappeared, at a complicated time in their personal life. Bonnard had another woman on his mind, even though he loved Marthe very much. Life with Marthe was not easy, I imagine.”

The Bonnards had been together – they were not married, but Marthe was known as Madame Bonnard – for nearly 30 years when Bonnard had an affair with a young art student named Renee Monchaty. Bonnard was a keen traveller. Monchaty joined him on trips the housebound Marthe would never have considered. He even asked her to marry him.

I find it hard to say what was going on.

Miranda Wallace, NGV curator

In the earliest of his agonising absences, Marthe began drawing the same subjects he painted: flowers, china on a table, her dogs – but in pastel, which he rarely used. Bonnard, who never actually left her, was supportive. He encouraged her to take lessons from an artist friend, Louise Hervieu. In 1924, she had a successful show in Paris under the name Marthe Solange, selling 25 works and receiving good reviews.

“As Bonnard used to say, her work held its own, which means that it does have a presence,” says Serrano. “Her quite fresh, naive and joyful work had value in the eyes of the world then – and even more today.” Bonnard, who wrote almost nothing to anyone about his personal life, told people the exhibition made Marthe very happy.

Pierre Bonnard,  Marthe with absinthe (Marthe à l’absinthe) 1894 (detail).

Pierre Bonnard, Marthe with absinthe (Marthe à l’absinthe) 1894 (detail).Credit: Private collection, Paris

The story went into an even more dramatic reversal, however, in 1925, when Bonnard suddenly broke off his liaison with Renee Monchaty and married Marthe in a quiet civil ceremony. Wallace wonders if he was simply exhausted by drama and wanted to get back to work – she says his friend Henri Matisse sent him a card on the day of the ceremony that simply read “Long live painting” – but, tragically, there was more trouble ahead. A few weeks after the wedding, Monchaty committed suicide – a terrible punishment for them both, as Marthe and Renee were also friends. It was then that Marthe stopped drawing.

The following year, the Bonnards moved from their house on the Seine, where Claude Monet would row from Giverny for lunch, to the south of France. They were not without friends – Paul Signac and Matisse lived in neighbouring towns – but they were as far from Paris, where Marthe felt so ill at ease, as it was possible to go.

By coincidence, the Cannes Film Festival was showing a new biopic about the Bonnards’ lives, screening out of competition; it will come to Australia later this year or next. Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe stars A-list French actors Cecile de France and Vincent Macaigne and paints a lurid picture of the Monchaty crisis, suggesting that Pierre, Marthe and Renee were in a three-way sexual relationship, something that emerged in director Martin Provost’s research.

Cécile de France and Vincent Macaigne in Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe.

Cécile de France and Vincent Macaigne in Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe. Credit: © Carole Bethuel

In his press notes, Provost describes Marthe as manipulative and problematic; he adheres to the usual view that she was a millstone who condemned Bonnard to life as a carer. Cecile de France, while cheerfully describing her character as “completely crazy” in the last decade of her life, sees their shared life differently. Marthe withdrew from the world because she was afraid of being found out. For Pierre Bonnard, that may have been a relief.

“She wanted her own identity,” she says. “She invented a name like a demi-mondaine and of course, based on that, the day she fell in love it was a great victory because she could live up to her social ideals. But the problem with her lie was that she would then be forever completely closed in with the phantoms off her past. She’s a prisoner of her inner world, so it’s very painful.

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“That’s why she has a social phobia. She was so afraid of being revealed. She doesn’t have the codes for this social caste so she needs to go away. And then everyone says this is the wildness in her, she’s so crude and raw, that she excludes Pierre from high society. But no, this was not true. Pierre was so happy to be out of society, alone with his love and with nature. They really both created these masterpieces, because these are inseparable from this life.” Which, despite its heady beginnings, turned out to be a very respectable bourgeois life after all.

Marthe would devote her life in Le Cannet to her cats, dogs and swimming until she was swamped by illness; she never lifted a pastel again. “I think, for me, she had tried to become someone else, not just to be Pierre’s muse, but to be someone else in his eyes,” says Serrano. “And, given he married her, she succeeded. There was another woman who occupied Bonnard’s thoughts called Lucienne Dupuy de Frenelle, whom we don’t know much about, but who died in 1927 of illness.

“So there are many elements in this period: a complicated love life, a complicated life as a couple, which means that perhaps Marthe, feeling that everything was becoming ‘normal’ again, said to herself that it was enough. She didn’t have the need to do what she did any more. But that’s an interpretation that we can’t verify.”

Pierre Bonnard, Siesta (La Sieste) 1900 (detail).

Pierre Bonnard, Siesta (La Sieste) 1900 (detail).Credit: NGV

Pierre Bonnard died in 1947, five years after Marthe. A contemporary once described Bonnard as “the poet of the middle classes”, says Miranda Wallace. His pictures of children playing ball in a sunny garden or Marthe dozing in the afternoon conjured the idea of lives that were not opulent, but comfortable.

“That was a disparaging comment, because it’s not something progressive art is traditionally associated with. But I think there is an element of Bonnard’s paintings that does seem to encapsulate that middle-class existence. And that’s why he was credited and celebrated in a post-war context in France; he opened the door to a golden past that had been lost. People were looking at his paintings in a nostalgic way.”

She sees, however, a deeper silence in his work – “things not expressed”. “I find it hard to say what was going on, because I think part of what was going on was that it wasn’t spoken about. The situation was what it was. It’s an interesting tension between the sun-drenched south of France and emotions that can be quite poignant. But I think he wanted the work to be both, you know. ‘He who sings is not always happy,’ as he said. So I’m really interested to see how people respond to them now.”

Pierre Bonnard opens at NGV International on June 9; ngv.vic.gov.au

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