Smut is banned

Pierre Bonnard’s Open Window [Phillips Collection, 1921] ...

... is an invitation to reverie. It is a hot, lazy summer day of a painting, as palpably warm as Monet’s winter scenes are shiveringly cold. Sit back, relax, let your thoughts wander. How can you do anything else in this heat? Here is a room where the walls glow orange like hot coals, a veritable oven of a place. If you touch that patch of wall below the curtain, it will burn you. And the white curtain itself has no cooling effect; against the sweltering orange, all the wintry associations of whiteness are burned away and the curtain looks white hot. Understandably, our eyes don’t linger long in this broiler of a room. We rush toward the large open window, and our visual escape into the window’s green and blue is like leaping into cool water on a 90° day. That band of blue sky is the painting’s relief: coolness, depth and distance combined with transparent lightness. It is a soothing tone, as calm and quiet as a Rothko rectangle. As we look at the painting, that illimitable blue is the focus of our waking dream.

I am a vandal.