“I’m bringing my box of pigments; waves of green, blue, and yellow will flow, each in turn. Arcachon: four patches of colour – the dark green of the fir trees, the light green of the sea, the yellow of the sand, and the blue of the sky. One has only to change the sizes of the patches to create twenty different views of Arcachon. This is how I imagine that enchanting land.”
Bonnard first visited Arcachon, a small resort town on the Atlantic coast of southwest France, around 1889 with his friend and future brother-in-law Claude Terrasse and he would go on to spend brief periods of t.mes there between 1920 and 1933. The present work was created towards the latter end of this period, during a phase of his painting that was dominated by “a trademark glow emanating from the volatile interaction of colour marks” (Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “The Imaginary Cinema of Pierre Bonnard” in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exh. cat., The Phillips collects ion, Washington, D.C., 2002-2003, p. 69).
Matinée à Arcachon is a striking, atmospheric depiction of a seascape on the Atlantic coast, comprised primarily of shimmering horizontal bands of colour. It is emblematic of Bonnard’s remarkably luminous palette and confident brushwork. The work is filled with the calm energy and feeling of possibility of a dawning sun, both created by and reflected in the artist’s developed Neo-Impressionist style, which is characterised by a broader, more irregular brushstroke in this period. This is particularly apparent in the masterful and sensitive handling of the sky, in which jewel-like yellows, greens, pinks and violets feature, in addition to the more usual white and blue. These flickers of tone add a very particular vitality to the picture surface, while also evocatively conveying the fresh mistiness of the morning air.
“For a realist from the north like Bonnard, southern light was a prerequisite for his emerging art of colour […] he needed, as he said, the lush pastures and passing clouds of the north as a fitting complement to the heat and t.mes lessness of the south, in the same way that an intense red engenders a green after-image”
Echoes of Bonnard's works from this period such as Matinée à Arcachon would come to influence both the formalised, chromatic structure and dabbed brushwork of Mark Rothko’s abstract works. Similarly, the use of horizontal layers of form has found resonance with photographers such as Andreas Gursky in a redefining of the boundaries between the natural and human landscapes. However, perhaps closest to the present work are Bridget Riley’s stripe paintings of the late 1960s and the 1980s. In these later works, Riley would take Bonnard’s generation of light through the juxtaposition of broken colour to its logical, refined conclusion, hinted at by the earlier artist’s awareness of chromatic abstraction: “I realized […] that colour could express everything with no relief or texture. I understood that it was possible to translate light, shapes and characters alone, without the need for values" (quoted in Gaston Diehl, “Pierre Bonnard dans son univers enchanté,” Comoedia, no. 106, 10th July 1943).
“There is always colour, [but] it has yet to become light” (Bonnard, quoted in A. Terrasse, “Bonnard's Notes,”