Morning in Paris

The two-part suite Morning in Paris and Evening in Paris depicts a district that the artist recorded many times in the period between 1893 and 1912. His studio was located there, close to the Boulevards de Clichy and des Batignolles. When he commissioned two pictures of Parisian life from Bonnard, Ivan Morozov left the artist entirely free to choose the exact subjects.
The main parameters for the genre and iconography of the future pair of paintings can be found in the series of colour lithographs entitled Some Aspects of Parisian Life that Bonnard produced in 1898 to a commission from Ambroise Vollard. Many figures from there found their way into the paintings — children, women, a little dog, a carriage — part of the urban landscape background is repeated exactly from one canvas to the other. Bonnard had previously depicted the junction on the Boulevard des Batignolles twice — in the paintings The Cart or The Rag-Pickers (1909, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), and Rag-Pickers or Return from Les Halles (early 1910, Salz Collection, New York, D. 640).
The motif of young women hurrying to work and moving directly towards the viewer, the oyster-seller, and the coal-merchant’s cart in the very centre of the composition — is a precise indication of the time, literally to within a quarter of a hour. A few minutes more and the situation in the street will alter, other personages will make their appearance, since these will have done their business — the wares, sold, the coal delivered, the covey of maidens disappearing from view. The main details look like readily recognizable patterns for the accustomed eye. There is no point in examining them in depth: the picture’s subject is the morning itself, and the characters only serve to designate it.
Accentuating the formal, figurative properties of painting, Bonnard deviated from the courses already taken in the depiction of Paris’s squares and crossroads by his predecessors, the Impressionists Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte. The social tendentiousness and photographic precision of Jules Adler were alien to him. Still, employing to some degree those artists’ techniques, Bonnard engaged in a polemic with them and, among other things, insisted upon the decorativeness of his own works.

Commentary by Albert Kostenevich