Bonnard's Doubt - Painting from Memory

In ‘realistic’ paintings, artists try to convey the joy of their interactions with nature by detaining them in paint. This compels the spectator to ask the question not only ‘is it beautiful?’ but also ‘what is it?’ 

But how do we know if a painting is realistic if we haven’t seen the artist’s original subject? For as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus: ‘in order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.’

In the case of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), whose work is celebrated in a large exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria from June to October this year, there is often the strange sense that we know what he was painting was real, but we’re not sure what it was. This is because he was always trying to recapture ‘the primary conception’ of an experience before it was frozen…