Rather than rejecting abstrac-tion, Bonnard meets it halfway, appending his human subjects to a strong formal pattern. Bonnard's experiments with perception can best be seen in his play with mirrors, with the surfaces of tables, or in his repeated juxtaposition of indoor and outdoor scenes. Instead of accepting the fiction that a painter can actually observe himself, Bonnard situates his self-portraits in the viewpoint of someone examining himself in a bathroom mirror, complete with shaving equipment in the foreground. With his face in shadow, his eyes like vacant apertures on eternity, he is a man wryly assimi-lating his own cadaverous appearance, his impending nonbeing. In The Bathroom Mirror , the washstand with its rounded pitcher and bowl dominates the foreground, but the mirror image hangs above it like a video screen or a painting within a painting.
Vertical separations turn the painting into a kind of triptych.
After these mirror paintings, Bonnard's favorite device for achieving this double vision was through his striking images of a window or doorway looking out onto a bit of landscape. He loves juxtaposing the indoor and outdoor worlds, with their sharply diverging color, light, and density of detail. As if he were analyzing the stages of modern art in a single canvas, Bonnard will bring together a geometrical interior, dominated by the panels of a door, the frame of the window, the shape of a table, with a piece of Impressionist land-scape that is simply a riot of light and color. The ostensible subject simply becomes the occasion for an experiment in form and a typically modern investigation of color and vision. Instead of forming a ground for the objects resting on them, these whites, which are blindingly intense, seem almost to hover above the surface as they link up with bolts of whiteness elsewhere in the work.