Babies, baths, water. It's all linked isn’t it? The bulging belly fit to burst, making an island in the water. Visible movements of the baby. Sticky-out belly button. So alien to a man. Fascinating.
The figure held between areas of pattern.
Tiles forming some modernist flat shape against the messier nature of the untiled wall. Paint as shampoo, water, flesh. An element of threat. Under the water you never feel totally safe.
Bonnard’s bath paintings blew me away when I first saw them on an art school trip to Paris 1991 (bus from Aberdeen). Painting as dream, floating ephemeral watery dream, Marthe’s body sometimes barely visible, as if there had been fusion at a molecular level of bath and person.
What more great paintings you would have made if, Pierre, you and Marthe had had a baby.
Guernica is a great painting and arguably more important than any of Bonnard’s bath paintings, but I don’t think about Guernica much. I think about Bonnard every time I’m in a bathroom.