You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met.

The old man faces us, naked from the waist up. His bald head, covered in shadow but sharply defined, tilts forward at a niggling angle—as if its weight were increasingly untenable. His skin is translucent and seems barely capable of holding together. Propped within an almost impossibly compressed space, the man gazes intently at nothing in particular. He is, it is clear, distracted by his own mortality.

You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met. Is there a modern or contemporary artist who dedicated himself to flesh and bone with as much terrifying candor? German Expressionists are stylistic show-boaters in comparison; Lucian Freud, a cackhanded academician. Alice Neel? Cartoon angst. Jenny Saville? Oh, please.

Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) and the less scabrous if equally intense Self-Portrait (1938-40) are, literally speaking, the odd men out at the Met. Nowhere else in the exhibition does Bonnard plumb psyche or physiognomy with as much daunting specificity. But their fairly overt character amplifies Bonnard’s art—or, at least, how it is popularly perceived—in ways that otherwise might prove elusive. Forget the doting painter of cozy domesticity. The French master is something altogether more haunting, idiosyncratic and unclassifiable.

Bonnard (1867-1947) is an artist beloved by many, but not by all. His luminous pictures of fruit baskets, breakfast tables and keening, afternoon light have engendered surprising rancor. Only those “who know nothing about the grave difficulties of art,” wrote art critic Christian Zervos shortly after Bonnard’s death, could admire pictures as “facile and agreeable.” Picasso famously loathed Bonnard’s art: “That’s not painting, what he does.”

In our own time, art historian Linda Nochlin fantasized about “plung[ing] a knife” into a Bonnard canvas for its presumed feminist affronts. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl described Bonnard’s paintings as “masturbatory” and “eye candy.” Writing in the catalog, art historian Jack Flam mentions how Bonnard has been dismissed as “lightweight.” “Bourgeois” is a common epithet.

Better abuse than neglect, but even then, Bonnard suffers. Mr. Flam points to the artist’s fortunes in the academy: “Many people who teach general courses in twentieth-century art simply leave him out.” He traces Bonnard’s “invisibility” primarily to narrow historical strictures. Sure, his innovative work with the Nabis is an important Modernist pit stop. But mostly, Bonnard was a mousy guy given to meditations on place, intimacy and loss. How sexy is that?

The 19th-century trails Bonnard. It can be somewhat startling to realize that he painted up until the time of Abstract Expressionism. But though Bonnard followed upon post-Impressionist logic, he didn’t coast on or rehash its verities. His vision veered into more personal and psychologically charged aesthetic terrain. His deceptively unkempt pictures have their equivalents less in a rock ’em, sock ’em roll call of isms than in, say, Proust’s rueful elaborations on memory. It’s not that Bonnard wasn’t forward-looking. It’s that his vision was encompassing.

What that “more” might be can be hard to finger. Part of the pleasure we derive from Bonnard’s art is its polite refusal to yield its secrets. In The White Tablecloth (1925), bread, fruit and drink are set out on an expansive white tablecloth. A woman in a striped robe stands at the table, her back hunched in stony reverie; Bonnard renders her monumental, sphinxlike. Another woman, altogether less corporeal, glimpses blandly aside. Drama is both overstated and never realized. It’s a masterpiece of narrative elision. Here, but not only here, does Bonnard reveal himself as the 20th-century’s Vermeer.

Painting from memory, Bonnard created patchwork encapsulations of discrete experiences. However abundant or intricate a particular composition is, objects and figures are intransigent and isolated; they’re fixed within their own descriptive parameters. The wiry tension in Lunch (ca. 1932), also known as Breakfast, accrues from tenuously stated relations between a bouquet of flowers, a teapot, a teacup, a shimmering woman and a threatening silhouette. It’s a painting whose lush disharmony is almost unbearable to look at.

Bonnard’s art unsettles, not least because its seductions are irresistible. He brought to the pictures a chromatic density seemingly contradictory to his feathery touch. Color smolders into fruition, gaining in luxuriance and acidity. Bonnard’s brush—skittering, self-effacing and relentless—glances upon objects, but puts them in the service of mood: We recognize things, but the image itself is suffused in a haze of paint. His sometimes infuriating modesty can’t disguise his aesthetic rigor. As a painter, he was, as a friend notes, “one tough son-of-a-bitch.”

“The Late Interiors” continues the conversation about history’s limitations put into motion by the Met’s recent Morandi exhibition. What to do about great artists whose peculiarities prevent them from efficient categorization and Major status? You can celebrate their underdog marginality or you can question the received wisdom. Bonnard may well piss off people because he’s no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but his mastery is irrefutable all the same. He’s just that good. 

“The history of twentieth-century art,” Mr. Flam concludes, “must be reckoned in a different way.” “The Late Interiors” is a welcome step in that reevaluation.

mnaves@observer.com

“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until April 19.

The first gallery sets the tone, with masterworks or near-masterworks by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Aristide Maillol, Mary Cassatt and Édouard Vuillard, a painter whose greatness we have yet to grasp fully. Some surprises set us happily off-kilter—a tabletop sculpture by Bonnard, for one. A treasure trove of paintings by Cézanne awaits in the second gallery. We’re not even a quarter of the way through the exhibition, and it’s time for a breather.

Patron of the Avant-Garde is the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). What took so long? A show detailing the efforts of one of the most significant movers and shakers of modern culture seems like a no-brainer. Vollard was an art dealer—please, let’s not use the term “gallerist”—of prescient gifts. Though his Paris gallery was not the first to exhibit avant-garde works, it was pivotal to the fortunes and development of modern art.

Vollard took enormous risks, both financial and aesthetic, promoting artists whose merits were misunderstood, considered dubious or otherwise ignored. He exhibited paintings by van Gogh in 1895, when the volatile Dutchman, now regarded as the prototypical outcast-genius, was still far from a staple of mass culture. “The boldest were unable to stomach [van Gogh’s] paintings,” Vollard said.

The Hungarian photographer Brassaï recalls Vollard saying that “Cézanne was considered a madman or impostor” and that other dealers held his art “in contempt.” Vollard’s reminiscences were clouded by a measure of self-mythologizing: The critical response to the 1895 Cézanne exhibition was mostly positive. Still, the paintings were known only to a passionate few. That the few became the many is due in no small part to Vollard’s promotion of Cézanne’s monumental accomplishment. The relationship with the French master was the lynchpin of Vollard’s career.

Along with van Gogh and Cézanne, Vollard went on to give major (and often first-time) exhibitions to Bonnard, Maillol, Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Henri Rousseau, Georges Rouault, André Derain, Kees Van Dongen and a 19-year-old Spaniard by the name of Pablo Picasso. Vollard’s gallery became a hot spot in Paris—“a place,” writes independent curator and art historian Ann Dumas, “where one went to be shocked.”

Clearly, Vollard possessed an extraordinarily perceptive eye. His winning streak is astonishing. In some ways, Vollard’s aesthetic sensibility was as advanced as that of the artists whose work he championed. Vollard’s like-mindedness and enthusiasm did not go unnoticed, particularly by those who might profit from his advocacy. “He shows nothing but pictures of the young,” wrote the painter Camille Pissarro. “I believe this little dealer is the one we have been seeking.”

The “little dealer”—Vollard was actually a shambling bear of a man—was also a savvy entrepreneur. He knew the value of causing a stir and took pride in being a visionary operating in a world of philistines. Later in life, when his success and status were secure, Vollard sought to maintain his anti-establishment cred.

Artist and patron have always had a vexed relationship. Vollard’s business practices did not always sit well with his roster. Gauguin dismissed him as “a crocodile of the worst sort,” Matisse called him a “thief” and Émile Bernard dubbed him “Vole Art.” But in one gallery, Vollard is seen more favorably through the eyes of artists whose work he represented. According to Picasso, whose painting of Vollard is among the greatest portraits of the 20th century, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved more often than Vollard.”

Bonnard rendered the dealer sympathetically in three homey tableaus. To Cézanne, Vollard was as inevitable and imposing as his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Renoir painted Vollard, an admirer of exotic fashions, as a toreador. The bond between the two men is patent in this flamboyant, endearing and somewhat ridiculous picture. Intimacy and good humor are equally evident in a tender, moving film clip of Vollard lighting one up with Renoir, whose hands are contorted by arthritis.

Oohs and aahs will greet the inclusion of Gauguin’s epochal Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), yet this hambone of a painter is better seen in the equally iconic and probably definitive Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). Here the mysteries of the Other—has that condescending bit of jargon expired yet?—are imbued with a respect for Tahitian culture that’s a welcome change from Gauguin’s usual take on the noble savage.

Van Gogh has an entire room set aside for his paintings, including Starry Night Over the Rhone (Starry Night, Arles) (1888). The depth and reach of his influence is seen two rooms later in a gallery set aside for the Fauves. With Bank of the Seine at Chatou (ca. 1905) and Harvest (1904), Maurice de Vlaminck beats van Gogh at his own game.

Among the most startling pieces on view is Edgar Degas’ The Bath (c. 1895). The subject—a woman stepping into a tub—will come as no surprise, nor will its casual shaping. But Degas’ canvas is still outrageous and even a bit alarming in its roughness and freedom. Its loose-limbed nature probably owes something to the artist’s failing eyesight. There was some disagreement as to whether the painting was finished when Vollard purchased it from Degas’ estate. Who cares? Vollard didn’t. Neither should we. The Bath is a bravura performance.

The surfeit of riches culminates with Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1939), a portfolio of 100 lithographs. A dazzling meditation on myth, the artist’s vocation, antiquity, Rembrandt and a raging libido, the Vollard Suite deserves its own exhibition. As it is, the prints are crammed into the final gallery, sharing space with what is basically an adumbrated retrospective of Picasso’s paintings. Visitors can barely muster the energy to take in one or two of the prints (forget 100).

One disappointment is the skimpy showing of work by the sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944). His Venus with a Necklace (ca. 1918) teasingly opens the show, and his uncanny sculptures—among them an incisive and loving portrait of Renoir—punctuate the exhibition. Their scarcity leaves one hankering for more.

Perhaps the curators felt that Maillol’s swelling volumes, languorous contours and stolid sensuality are too tranquil and subtle for a public weaned on Big Names. Or maybe they just couldn’t secure the loans. Whatever the case, such a small gaffe doesn’t diminish the heady momentum of Patron of the Avant-Garde.

Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 7, 2007.

The first gallery sets the tone, with masterworks or near-masterworks by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Aristide Maillol, Mary Cassatt and Édouard Vuillard, a painter whose greatness we have yet to grasp fully. Some surprises set us happily off-kilter—a tabletop sculpture by Bonnard, for one. A treasure trove of paintings by Cézanne awaits in the second gallery. We’re not even a quarter of the way through the exhibition, and it’s time for a breather.

Patron of the Avant-Garde is the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939). What took so long? A show detailing the efforts of one of the most significant movers and shakers of modern culture seems like a no-brainer. Vollard was an art dealer—please, let’s not use the term “gallerist”—of prescient gifts. Though his Paris gallery was not the first to exhibit avant-garde works, it was pivotal to the fortunes and development of modern art.

Vollard took enormous risks, both financial and aesthetic, promoting artists whose merits were misunderstood, considered dubious or otherwise ignored. He exhibited paintings by van Gogh in 1895, when the volatile Dutchman, now regarded as the prototypical outcast-genius, was still far from a staple of mass culture. “The boldest were unable to stomach [van Gogh’s] paintings,” Vollard said.

The Hungarian photographer Brassaï recalls Vollard saying that “Cézanne was considered a madman or impostor” and that other dealers held his art “in contempt.” Vollard’s reminiscences were clouded by a measure of self-mythologizing: The critical response to the 1895 Cézanne exhibition was mostly positive. Still, the paintings were known only to a passionate few. That the few became the many is due in no small part to Vollard’s promotion of Cézanne’s monumental accomplishment. The relationship with the French master was the lynchpin of Vollard’s career.

Along with van Gogh and Cézanne, Vollard went on to give major (and often first-time) exhibitions to Bonnard, Maillol, Renoir, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Henri Rousseau, Georges Rouault, André Derain, Kees Van Dongen and a 19-year-old Spaniard by the name of Pablo Picasso. Vollard’s gallery became a hot spot in Paris—“a place,” writes independent curator and art historian Ann Dumas, “where one went to be shocked.”

Clearly, Vollard possessed an extraordinarily perceptive eye. His winning streak is astonishing. In some ways, Vollard’s aesthetic sensibility was as advanced as that of the artists whose work he championed. Vollard’s like-mindedness and enthusiasm did not go unnoticed, particularly by those who might profit from his advocacy. “He shows nothing but pictures of the young,” wrote the painter Camille Pissarro. “I believe this little dealer is the one we have been seeking.”

The “little dealer”—Vollard was actually a shambling bear of a man—was also a savvy entrepreneur. He knew the value of causing a stir and took pride in being a visionary operating in a world of philistines. Later in life, when his success and status were secure, Vollard sought to maintain his anti-establishment cred.

Artist and patron have always had a vexed relationship. Vollard’s business practices did not always sit well with his roster. Gauguin dismissed him as “a crocodile of the worst sort,” Matisse called him a “thief” and Émile Bernard dubbed him “Vole Art.” But in one gallery, Vollard is seen more favorably through the eyes of artists whose work he represented. According to Picasso, whose painting of Vollard is among the greatest portraits of the 20th century, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved more often than Vollard.”

Bonnard rendered the dealer sympathetically in three homey tableaus. To Cézanne, Vollard was as inevitable and imposing as his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire. Renoir painted Vollard, an admirer of exotic fashions, as a toreador. The bond between the two men is patent in this flamboyant, endearing and somewhat ridiculous picture. Intimacy and good humor are equally evident in a tender, moving film clip of Vollard lighting one up with Renoir, whose hands are contorted by arthritis.

Oohs and aahs will greet the inclusion of Gauguin’s epochal Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), yet this hambone of a painter is better seen in the equally iconic and probably definitive Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). Here the mysteries of the Other—has that condescending bit of jargon expired yet?—are imbued with a respect for Tahitian culture that’s a welcome change from Gauguin’s usual take on the noble savage.

Van Gogh has an entire room set aside for his paintings, including Starry Night Over the Rhone (Starry Night, Arles) (1888). The depth and reach of his influence is seen two rooms later in a gallery set aside for the Fauves. With Bank of the Seine at Chatou (ca. 1905) and Harvest (1904), Maurice de Vlaminck beats van Gogh at his own game.

Among the most startling pieces on view is Edgar Degas’ The Bath (c. 1895). The subject—a woman stepping into a tub—will come as no surprise, nor will its casual shaping. But Degas’ canvas is still outrageous and even a bit alarming in its roughness and freedom. Its loose-limbed nature probably owes something to the artist’s failing eyesight. There was some disagreement as to whether the painting was finished when Vollard purchased it from Degas’ estate. Who cares? Vollard didn’t. Neither should we. The Bath is a bravura performance.

The surfeit of riches culminates with Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1939), a portfolio of 100 lithographs. A dazzling meditation on myth, the artist’s vocation, antiquity, Rembrandt and a raging libido, the Vollard Suite deserves its own exhibition. As it is, the prints are crammed into the final gallery, sharing space with what is basically an adumbrated retrospective of Picasso’s paintings. Visitors can barely muster the energy to take in one or two of the prints (forget 100).

One disappointment is the skimpy showing of work by the sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944). His Venus with a Necklace (ca. 1918) teasingly opens the show, and his uncanny sculptures—among them an incisive and loving portrait of Renoir—punctuate the exhibition. Their scarcity leaves one hankering for more.

Perhaps the curators felt that Maillol’s swelling volumes, languorous contours and stolid sensuality are too tranquil and subtle for a public weaned on Big Names. Or maybe they just couldn’t secure the loans. Whatever the case, such a small gaffe doesn’t diminish the heady momentum of Patron of the Avant-Garde.

Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 7, 2007.

Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the theology which haggled hotly over the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle and has about the same influence on art as it did on true faith.” The artist had little patience for orthodoxy, fashion or “the American collector (and dealer),” though he was magnanimous enough to note that a “few exceptions … are cheerfully granted.”

The prospect of uncovering more wisdom on the flipside of Friedman’s paintings is tempting, but not so much that we start taking the pictures off the wall. It’s what’s up front that counts, and it counts for a lot. The Language of Paint, the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work in over 50 years, confirms that Friedman is, in fact, an American master.

By organizing this show, Hollis Taggart Galleries and guest curator William C. Agee aim to right a historical injustice. Highly regarded in his lifetime, Friedman’s paintings found homes in the Phillips Collection, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and satisfied the uncommonly stringent standards of Clement Greenberg. Today, only a small coterie of admirers knows his oeuvre. Friedman is a specialist’s passion. It’s worth asking why that is.

In the catalog essay, Mr. Agee writes that Friedman was “by any account … a mainstream artist” participating “in the broad aesthetic thrusts that defined American art from 1905 to 1946.” He suggests that Friedman’s “originality” as a painter “caused him at times to appear as a kind of ‘outsider.’” There’s a headstrong awkwardness to his art, an eccentricity and drive not far from that of, say, John Kane, a folk painter whose striking images were much admired by modernists.

Yet Friedman wasn’t a rube. He studied at the Art Students League under Robert Henri, who also taught the likes of George Bellows, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois. The early pieces on view at Hollis Taggart—formative attempts at Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and, a bit more furtively, Surrealism—demonstrate a deep, if not particularly distinctive, understanding of modernist currents.

But Friedman’s art ultimately strayed from the avant-garde—or perhaps it’s better to say that it enlarged upon the notion of what “avant-garde” could mean. Greenberg intuited as much when he likened Friedman to Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, painters who proved that “there were possibilities in Impressionism which the nineteenth century failed to exhaust.”

Friedman’s art does bear some comparison to the French masters. Vuillard is evident in the density of surfaces, Bonnard in the fluctuating areas of closely valued hues. The example of both men can be gleaned in a devotion to representation—in particular, to domestic interiors, the landscape and people. Yet it’s a mistake, I think, to peg Friedman as an “impressionist,” as Greenberg did. It makes him sound altogether too French. If there is any such thing as an American artist, Arnold Friedman is it.

There’s a marked shift in the work round about 1930. European precedent isn’t assimilated so much as blanketed; sophistication and poetry are overtaken, if not completely stifled, by a dour pragmatism. The subjects of the paintings—whether they be the Grand Central Highway, a vegetable stand or the New Jersey wetlands—become unrelentingly and, at times, disconcertingly concrete. Facts take precedence over sensation. The pictures are blunt, terse, severe and uncompromising.

Friedman’s willfulness can be traced, at least in part, to his duties at the U.S. Postal Service. Though he described his job as a “lame way of ducking” the concessions inherent in being a professional artist, he was mindful of the freedom a 9-to-5 gig allowed. Working for the post office “yielded a measure of independent and responcible [sic] citizenship! What American painter was permitted to retain them! Speak up!”

This degree of autonomy from the marketplace appealed to Friedman’s Yankee individualism, and it lent power to the work’s harsh integrity. His paintings from the 1940’s go off on wild and unexpected tangents. Surfaces become sharp and gritty, spaces zooming and skewed. Some compositions are abruptly sectioned off. Others are engulfed by scratchy flickers of paint and an otherworldly light. The paintings court abstraction without sacrificing representation, which Friedman clung to with a forbidding resolve. An all but unbearable tension between material and illusion is brought to bear on paintings like Shore Path and At the Lake (both circa 1940-41).

The late landscapes are especially intense. Their blunt and monumental forms are barely held in check by the perimeters of the canvas. Surfaces are built up into all-over fields of crusty pigment. Friedman likened oil paint to “a coquette [who] must be variously coaxed, coerced, humored, driven or caressed.” This pursuit clearly became more vexing the longer Friedman painted. Given the evidence on view, it also provided a greater sense of aesthetic reward.

Hollis Taggart and Mr. Agee have mounted an invaluable exhibition, and anyone interested in the art of painting should see it. Yet it seems unlikely that Friedman’s achievement will ever receive as much acclaim as it deserves or garner a wider audience. The traditional nature of Friedman’s subjects, Mr. Agee writes, obscures the “genuinely new and advanced” character of his work. His paintings can’t easily fit into a culture that favors superficial novelty.

In other words, they aren’t crowd-pleasers. Friedman probably would have considered such a thing a curse; so should we. His ornery sense of principle was a motivating force, and his marginal standing is something he worked hard to earn. How many other American artists have been as ruthlessly true to their art? As Friedman would demand: “Speak up!”

Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint is at Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Avenue, until June 30.

Friedman liked to vent his spleen by writing on the backs of his canvases. One note reads: “Modern aestheticism with its obscurantism and obfuscation bears the same relation to the theology which haggled hotly over the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle and has about the same influence on art as it did on true faith.” The artist had little patience for orthodoxy, fashion or “the American collector (and dealer),” though he was magnanimous enough to note that a “few exceptions … are cheerfully granted.”

The prospect of uncovering more wisdom on the flipside of Friedman’s paintings is tempting, but not so much that we start taking the pictures off the wall. It’s what’s up front that counts, and it counts for a lot. The Language of Paint, the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work in over 50 years, confirms that Friedman is, in fact, an American master.

By organizing this show, Hollis Taggart Galleries and guest curator William C. Agee aim to right a historical injustice. Highly regarded in his lifetime, Friedman’s paintings found homes in the Phillips Collection, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and satisfied the uncommonly stringent standards of Clement Greenberg. Today, only a small coterie of admirers knows his oeuvre. Friedman is a specialist’s passion. It’s worth asking why that is.

In the catalog essay, Mr. Agee writes that Friedman was “by any account … a mainstream artist” participating “in the broad aesthetic thrusts that defined American art from 1905 to 1946.” He suggests that Friedman’s “originality” as a painter “caused him at times to appear as a kind of ‘outsider.’” There’s a headstrong awkwardness to his art, an eccentricity and drive not far from that of, say, John Kane, a folk painter whose striking images were much admired by modernists.

Yet Friedman wasn’t a rube. He studied at the Art Students League under Robert Henri, who also taught the likes of George Bellows, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois. The early pieces on view at Hollis Taggart—formative attempts at Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and, a bit more furtively, Surrealism—demonstrate a deep, if not particularly distinctive, understanding of modernist currents.

But Friedman’s art ultimately strayed from the avant-garde—or perhaps it’s better to say that it enlarged upon the notion of what “avant-garde” could mean. Greenberg intuited as much when he likened Friedman to Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, painters who proved that “there were possibilities in Impressionism which the nineteenth century failed to exhaust.”

Friedman’s art does bear some comparison to the French masters. Vuillard is evident in the density of surfaces, Bonnard in the fluctuating areas of closely valued hues. The example of both men can be gleaned in a devotion to representation—in particular, to domestic interiors, the landscape and people. Yet it’s a mistake, I think, to peg Friedman as an “impressionist,” as Greenberg did. It makes him sound altogether too French. If there is any such thing as an American artist, Arnold Friedman is it.

There’s a marked shift in the work round about 1930. European precedent isn’t assimilated so much as blanketed; sophistication and poetry are overtaken, if not completely stifled, by a dour pragmatism. The subjects of the paintings—whether they be the Grand Central Highway, a vegetable stand or the New Jersey wetlands—become unrelentingly and, at times, disconcertingly concrete. Facts take precedence over sensation. The pictures are blunt, terse, severe and uncompromising.

Friedman’s willfulness can be traced, at least in part, to his duties at the U.S. Postal Service. Though he described his job as a “lame way of ducking” the concessions inherent in being a professional artist, he was mindful of the freedom a 9-to-5 gig allowed. Working for the post office “yielded a measure of independent and responcible [ sic] citizenship! What American painter was permitted to retain them! Speak up!”

This degree of autonomy from the marketplace appealed to Friedman’s Yankee individualism, and it lent power to the work’s harsh integrity. His paintings from the 1940’s go off on wild and unexpected tangents. Surfaces become sharp and gritty, spaces zooming and skewed. Some compositions are abruptly sectioned off. Others are engulfed by scratchy flickers of paint and an otherworldly light. The paintings court abstraction without sacrificing representation, which Friedman clung to with a forbidding resolve. An all but unbearable tension between material and illusion is brought to bear on paintings like Shore Path and At the Lake (both circa 1940-41).

The late landscapes are especially intense. Their blunt and monumental forms are barely held in check by the perimeters of the canvas. Surfaces are built up into all-over fields of crusty pigment. Friedman likened oil paint to “a coquette [who] must be variously coaxed, coerced, humored, driven or caressed.” This pursuit clearly became more vexing the longer Friedman painted. Given the evidence on view, it also provided a greater sense of aesthetic reward.

Hollis Taggart and Mr. Agee have mounted an invaluable exhibition, and anyone interested in the art of painting should see it. Yet it seems unlikely that Friedman’s achievement will ever receive as much acclaim as it deserves or garner a wider audience. The traditional nature of Friedman’s subjects, Mr. Agee writes, obscures the “genuinely new and advanced” character of his work. His paintings can’t easily fit into a culture that favors superficial novelty.

In other words, they aren’t crowd-pleasers. Friedman probably would have considered such a thing a curse; so should we. His ornery sense of principle was a motivating force, and his marginal standing is something he worked hard to earn. How many other American artists have been as ruthlessly true to their art? As Friedman would demand: “Speak up!”

Arnold Friedman: The Language of Paint is at Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Avenue, until June 30.

Not long ago, I spent the optimal amount of time in Chicago, which is five hours. As a matter of habit, I spent those hours at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1997, the museum received from the Lannan Foundation a passel of Gerhard Richter paintings. The paintings, including Woman Descending the Staircase, were temporarily installed in a very claustrophobic room.

For no known reason, alone and pressed upon by these wild cold paintings, I had a … something. An ecstasy? A moment of exhaustion? A revelation?

And then I returned, myself and not myself, to the train station and continued out west.

That experience is, with fewer tears, the subject of Michael Kimmelman’s wide-roaming, friendly and erudite new book, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. His idea, expressed as a non-chronological junket of artists far and near, is a simple one, and populist at heart: He believes that there are more ways of making and enjoying art than can be contained on canvas and in stuffy galleries.

Mr. Kimmelman, the mild-natured chief art critic of The New York Times, has been for a while now less a critic and more a hagiographer. He has seemed unwilling to use his position as a pulpit.

His recent review of the Robert Smithson exhibition at the Whitney ran as a long, long introductory profile. When he returned from the Venice Biennale this June, he emphasized its “Rashomon-like” nature: Visitors there couldn’t, or wouldn’t, decide what they liked, he reported, and only then, gently, did he offer his own endorsements. In May, for the Times Magazine, he profiled 97-year-old architect Oscar Niemeyer. Most memorably, early this year he nailed a profile of the reclusive Nevadan land artist Michael Heizer.

It’s clear that Mr. Kimmelman likes and respects artists. And he’s wise to have found himself this niche. Daily arts criticism is grueling; it requires a constant, intense clarity possessed by very few. And I presume that the best way to remain unsullied by the resurgent importance of the marketplace in the art world is to turn to the lives of our largely non-commercial saints.

But Mr. Kimmelman isn’t merely steering clear; he’s also stepped up to confront the dark forces at work. In May, he attacked the tacky ways of museum money-making, calling MoMA “Modernism Inc.” and P.S.1’s Greater New York exhibition “a shallow affair in thrall to the booming art market.” Last month, he denounced the whorishness of today’s museums. For the even-tempered Mr. Kimmelman, writing that “museums, having devalued their principles for short-term gains, may earn the public’s contempt in the long run” is akin to a less kindly—but still accurate—critic declaring, “These fuckers are crooks!”

And The Accidental Masterpiece is Mr. Kimmelman’s quiet explication of the philosophy that guides this daily work.

But … I once had a lover who believed that he was different because he was an artist. He’s in prison now—not a coincidence—and so he no longer has the opportunity to paint. And yet he still carries this identity status with him. His relation to his government, to his home, his clothing: Everything is predicated on (or, more often, excused by) this sense of identity.

The idea that an artist is a different sort of person is a lie. “To live intensely is one of the basic human desires and an artistic necessity,” writes Mr. Kimmelman of Pierre Bonnard and us all. These essentialist ideas about artisthood scamper—discreetly, for the most part—throughout the book. Mr. Kimmelman’s thesis and, I think, his true belief is that the joys of art may be found in pilgrimage, in obsession, in collecting, in enjoying extremely private activities, even in just looking. Any of us, artist or not, can experience this joy. But Mr. Kimmelman cannot quite shake the mistaken idea that artists are a race apart.

“Most artists, like most people,” he writes, and the emphasis is mine, “have one good idea or maybe two in life, and that sustains them.”

The book reaches a climax with one of his favorite topics, the great outdoor artists, particularly Michael Heizer. These are difficult folk, rugged outsiders with big personalities: Donald Judd, James Turrell, Walter De Maria. Mr. Kimmelman writes, “It occurred to me, talking with [Heizer], why all these artists chose enormous western states … to work in: perhaps they imagined no puny eastern state was big enough to hold two of them.” Which is a funny line, and therefore totally worth it, but surely the megalomania of the earth artist is not very different from that of the i-banker?

But Mr. Kimmelman wants to believe, and that’s enough. His guided tour—of the Victorian photographs of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; of Antarctic photographer and Shackleton expedition member Frank Hurley; of Cézanne and Bonnard; of the blessed television painter Bob Ross; of Eva Hesse; of Nazi victim Charlotte Salomon; of Dr. Hugh Hicks, the dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs—trips intelligently and casually through time and space and across all genres.

As a travelogue, The Accidental Masterpiece rings absolutely true, and just lovely.

This is what Mr. Kimmelman means:

Two artists I know (and once represented, when I was misguidedly an art dealer), a sculptor, Stefanie Nagorka, and a painter, Joy Garnett, took a trip together to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Although seeing the Jetty—and, as Mr. Kimmelman points out, making a pilgrimage of the flight and the difficult drive is an essential component in the pleasure of that sort of artwork—was impressive and meaningful to them, they were most taken with something else.

This something else was orange flags on sticks. The flags are used in Salt Lake City, apparently, by street-crossers. Little baskets of them wait at the intersections. Although this civic program had only begun there in 2000—it had spread from Washington State and has since made it as far as Washington, D.C.—the flags seemed like the amazing remnant of some ancient and foreign ritual.

And it was the mystery of the orange flags—site-specific, and magical, and alien—that transported them artistically. And so, of course, they had to have them. They stole some, and brought them home with them.

Choire Sicha is a senior editor at The Observer.

The irony, of course, is that Rothko adamantly refused to acknowledge that he ever was or ever aspired to be an abstract painter. His blunt statement to the poet Selden Rodman in a 1957 interview-"You might as well get one thing straight …. I am not an abstractionist"-expressed a sentiment that he never tired of repeating. He seems truly to have believed it too, even as he continued to produce the paintings that all the world regards as prime examples of abstraction. A decade before that 1957 interview, Rothko was already insisting, "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers." The "dramas" he had in mind appear to have been the Greek tragedies. If ancient Greek drama was his measure of achievement, it's easier to understand why he would want to dismiss mere abstraction as an inadequate account of his artistic mission.

Painting is nonetheless the art to which Rothko's ambitions were confined, and the year 1949 marked the crucial turning point in his artistic development in that medium. Everything prior to that-especially his ill-fated detour into the mystifications of Surrealism-was a prologue to his emergence as a major abstract painter.

How, then, can we account for Rothko's unexpected breakthrough after a prolonged period of producing very minor work? Of the many attempts that have been made to elucidate what the current show calls the "Painter's Progress," Bernice Rose's essay for the Bonnard/Rothko show remains the most persuasive. To my mind, it's nothing less than conclusive.

In her essay, Ms. Rose identifies the winter of 1946-47 as the moment when Rothko commenced his search for an exit from the pervasive influence of the Surrealists. She asks the crucial question ("What was the catalyst for Rothko's shift?"), and provides an answer in veryspecificterms-painterlytermsthat shocked a lot of Rothko's admirers, who, in taking their cues from the artist, rejected all formalist explanation of his pictures.

"The forms and the range of hues in Rothko's first color paintings," according to Ms. Rose, "suggest that the immediate catalyst for change was Pierre Bonnard." Even more startling than the claim itself was the installation of Bonnard/Rothko , in which paintings by Bonnard were juxtaposed with the early Rothko color abstractions that were directly derived from them. The evidence was irrefutable, and so was Ms. Rose's account of the resulting change in Rothko's art.

"Bonnard's last exhibition in New York opened in December 1946 and ran through January 1947, the month of his death. It was a small exhibition, with 15 paintings, shown in a gallery that was well-known at the time, but has since closed, the Bignou Gallery on Madison Avenue. Rothko may well have looked at Bonnard earlier with his friend, the painter Milton Avery, but this time there seems to have been an immediate reaction: the leap into color. In the paintings that he began in that winter of 1946/47, now called Multiforms, Rothko's color patches appear to take up details of Bonnard's paintings and enlarge them, transforming Bonnard's tendency to free the colored paint gesture from the object description into a kind of abstraction …. This selection of abstract areas from Bonnard was one aspect of what Rothko took away with him from the exhibition. He also took away the sensation of brilliant color as the source of light."

Anyone who's made a close study of Bonnard's paintings will have no trouble finding traces of the French master's aesthetic in the pictures that have now been brought together in the Painter's Progress exhibition, which focuses on the year 1949. This was the year in which Rothko perfected his own mastery of the paintings he called "dramas," which most of us regard as some of the most beautiful abstract paintings in the entire modern canon.

It has been admitted that Bonnard was an unlikely figure to influence any painter associated with the Abstract Expressionists, who prided themselves on their independence from the School of Paris. And it goes without saying that Rothko never acknowledged the debt. Yet, as D.H. Lawrence once said-Trust the tale, not the teller of the tale-meaning, of course, that a writer's or artist's work must be judged on the basis of what it is, not on the basis of descriptive claims. Unless prompted by Rothko, I doubt that any visitor to Rothko: A Painter's Progress would regard this beautifully installed exhibition as a show of "dramas." But thanks to what we now know about Rothko's interest in Bonnard, this exhibition turns out to be an even richer experience than it might otherwise have been. It remains on view at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, through Feb. 23.

At the oldest of all our museums of modern art-the Phillips Collection, which was founded in Washington by the late Duncan Phillips in 1921-the featured talent almost from the outset has been Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), and this often underrated and sometimes scorned painter has remained a major presence at the Phillips Collection down to the present day. Hence the marvelous exhibition called Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late , which is now commodiously installed in the lovely rooms of the Phillips townhouse, where in every sense the work looks very much "at home."

As Jay Gates, the director of the Phillips Collection, reminds us in a forward to the catalog of the exhibition, "In 1925 Duncan Phillips was among the first in America to assert the modernity of Bonnard's work and to create a setting for its appreciation. Between 1925 and 1954 Phillips accumulated the largest and most diverse collection in the United States of paintings, drawings, and prints by Bonnard. Both artist and collector maintained a correspondence over the course of twenty years. When Bonnard came to America to serve on the jury of the Carnegie International in 1926, he visited the Phillips Memorial Gallery [as it was then called] …. At one point during the visit, Bonnard asked to borrow Marjorie's paint box"-Mrs. Phillips was herself an accomplished painter-"to add color to his painting entitled Early Spring (1910), which was then hanging in the museum's main gallery."

The exhibition that Elizabeth Hutton Turner, senior curator of the Phillips Collection, has mounted in the Early and Late show isn't as large as the 1998 Bonnard retrospective organized by John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet because the current show adds prints, posters, screens, books, sculptures and photographs to its excellent selection of early and late paintings, it's an exhibition that gives us a wider-ranging account of Bonnard's interests and accomplishments than most of us are used to seeing. The photographs-particularly the photographs of his beloved Marthe, the principal subject of so many paintings-are especially interesting. For while there is nothing even remotely "photographic" to be seen in Bonnard's paintings, the photographs were clearly useful to the artist in determining some of the "views" of his pictorial motifs. They sometimes have the quality of preliminary sketches.

In pondering the implications of the current exhibition, it may be useful, too, to be reminded that what especially impressed Duncan Phillips about Bonnard-his total independence from the received opinions of his time-was precisely what caused so much adverse criticism to be heaped upon Bonnard's work at various times in the 20th century. That the artist remained utterly indifferent to so many developments that were elsewhere acclaimed-Cubism, Dada, Surrealism and abstraction of every variety-could not be forgiven. And when Bonnard compounded the offense by openly avowing his debt to Monet, it was inevitable that he would be written off by the critics as a latter-day Impressionist, which in the heyday of Cubism and Dada was tantamount to a death sentence for any painter's reputation.

It's no coincidence that it wasn't until "late" Monet came to be rediscovered as an early 20th-century master of pictorial color that Bonnard, too, began to be recognized as one of the most radical color painters of the modern era. There's more chromatic invention to be found in almost any square inch of paintings like The Red Checkered Tablecloth (1910), among the early pictures, and the White Interior (1932) and The Large Bath, Nude (1937-39), among the later works, than in many large-scale surveys of contemporary color abstraction. Yet because Bonnard continued to the end to derive his inspiration from direct observation-his own shorthand term for it was "Nature"-and remained devoted to domestic interiors in so many of his major paintings, the trendiest criticism never understood his genius. Even more contemptible in recent years have been the political attacks by the feminist critics who object to Bonnard's paintings of his beloved Marthe's naked body.

Never mind. As the Goncourt brothers observed somewhere in the Journals they kept in the 19th century, a painting hanging in a museum is bound to be exposed to a multitude of idiotic opinions. It's all part of what Bonnard himself, in a letter to Matisse, called "the absurdities" that inevitably accompany the life of art. In this first decade of the 21st century, Bonnard has triumphantly survived the condescension and criticism he was obliged to endure in his lifetime, and we are all indebted in no small degree to the Phillips Collection for contributing so much for so long to this happy outcome.

Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late remains on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington through Jan. 19, 2003, and will then travel to the Denver Art Museum from March 1 to May 25, 2003.

At the same time, of course, Bonnard continued to command the admiration of artists who could not be accused of being stupid about painting. In response to the Cahiers d'Art assault, which asked the question "Pierre Bonnard: Is He a Great Painter?" and answered in the negative, an outraged Matisse declared: "Yes! I certify that Pierre Bonnard is a great painter, for today and for the future." Balthus, who did not especially esteem Matisse, nonetheless agreed with this high assessment of Bonnard. And in this country, Bonnard was much admired by, among others, Milton Avery, Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine, and, owing to their example, he came to exert a considerable influence on American painting over the last half-century. We now know that even Mark Rothko must also be numbered among the American painters crucially influenced by Bonnard.

With the current Bonnard exhibition drawing crowds at the Museum of Modern Art, it would be nice to think that all such debate about Bonnard's greatness had at last abated, but such is unhappily not the case. For if Bonnard has been forgiven for not being "avant-garde" in the manner of Picasso and the Cubists, his work now faces an even more formidable adversary from the camp of the radical feminists, who are just as vehemently unforgiving about the fact that he painted so many pictures of his beloved wife Marthe naked in the bathtub. Or so I infer from the remarkable article on "Bonnard's Bathers" by Linda Nochlin in the current issue of Art in America .

Ms. Nochlin, who is the Lila Acheson Wallace professor of modern art at N.Y.U.'s Institute of Fine Arts, can certainly not be accused of being stupid about painting, either. (Whether she can be accused of being stupid about life is another matter.) She has clearly made a close study of Bonnard's work, and is anything but blind to the pleasures it affords to the connoisseur of pure painting. Yet those pleasures are compromised for her by what she construes to be the sexual politics of Bonnard's paintings of his wife. "As a woman and a feminist," she writes, "I must say I find something distasteful, painful, even, about all that mushy, passive flesh. Yes, I am being naïve abandoning my art-historical objectivity, but certainly contradictory intuitions have a place in one's reactions to the work of art. I deeply admire, indeed at times, am passionately seduced by the pictorial rhetoric of Bonnard's bathers; yet, at the same time, and with equal intensity, I am also so repelled by the melting of flesh-and-blood model into the molten object of desire of the male painter that I want to plunge a knife into the delectable body-surface and shout, 'Wake up! Get out of the water and dry off! Throw him into the bathtub!'"

For Ms. Nochlin, "there is something abject and sinister about Bonnard's late bathers." She speaks of his depiction of Marthe in the late bathers as "a kind of elegant pourriture , exquisite rot," and of the "murderous sensual malignity or the bathers." Upon the entire "pictorial rhetoric of Bonnard's bathers," she thus imposes the pernicious rhetoric of her own sexual politics. And given Ms. Nochlin's position in the academy, you may be certain that this will now be the way Bonnard's paintings are "taught" in college classrooms the country over. It is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the animadversions of Cahiers d'Art , for they at least were still mainly concerned with the esthetics of painting. It is also a melancholy reminder of the extent to which the politicization of art history represents yet another episode in the revenge of the philistines, who nowadays are more likely than not to occupy an endowed chair in a distinguished university.

For those surviving members of the art public who are more interested in painting than in the sexual politics of art, however, this Bonnard exhibition will long be remembered as a great event. It is an exhibition that needs to be seen many times, for Bonnard is not the kind of painter whose work can be comprehended at first glance. Picasso was right in observing that in Bonnard's painting, "you never once get the big clash of the cymbals," for the subtleties of Bonnard's pictorial invention do not allow for that kind of facile appeal. Painting from memory and pondering the complexity of his own emotions, he often worked for years on individual pictures, altering their forms and increasing their chromatic heat until it more or less approximated the intensity of feeling he wished his art to convey.

That there is a large element of melancholy in Bonnard's art-and not only sexual melancholy, though there is plenty of that, too-only adds to the gravity or his achievement. It was once thought ridiculous to regard Bonnard's paintings as "deep"-for depth of thought and feeling was said to be the prerogative of an avant-garde with which Bonnard had few, if any, affinities-but now we know better. Yet in the paintings he created in the last decades of his life-and especially in those paintings of Marthe in the bathtub-he was certainly a greater painter than Picasso was in the last decades of his life.

This is not to say that the current exhibition at MoMA is perfect in every respect. It is shocking, for example, to find there are no drawings in the exhibition, for drawing was for Bonnard a medium of thought, and it leaves the newcomer to his work with a very incomplete idea of his pictorial imagination to isolate the paintings from the drawings that contributed something essential to their creation. The omission of the drawings also leaves the relation of drawing to color in Bonnard's painting unilluminated.

Then, too, the landscapes are given only a token representation in this exhibition, and that has the effect of leaving the visitor to the show with a somewhat distorted account of the range of his accomplishments. All the same, this is a marvelous exhibition but more marvelous to visit and revisit than to read about-and it remains on view at MoMA through Oct. 13.