A Mediterranean holiday for the eyes

The Faubourg Saint-Germain is silent in August, when the limousines of government ministers and ambassadors no longer sweep through the portals of its 18th-century stone townhouses. Tourists teem at the edges of this central Paris neighbourhood, on the terraces of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres cafes, and at the Orsay and Rodin museums.

Meanwhile, one of the best-kept secrets of the summer - a gem of an exhibition of 58 rarely shown Pierre Bonnard paintings from private collections - waits to be discovered a few minutes away, at the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol.

The French capital has not seen a Bonnard exhibition since 1984. Prompted in part by the success of the larger show at the Tate Gallery two years ago, 80-year-old Dina Vierny dedicated a retrospective to the man she considers "the greatest painter of the 20th century". Because the Maillol is relatively small and outside the state-run museum circuit, its expositions receive less fanfare than those at the Orsay or the Louvre. But the Russian-born Vierny, who began posing nude for the sculptor Aristide Maillol when she was 19, has an unerring eye for art. Her permanent collection includes many of Maillol's voluptuous statues, as well as works by Duchamp, Matisse and Kandinsky. The silent, spacious rooms of the museum have the feel of a monastery or a cool cellar in summer.

The brilliantly coloured canvases of the Bonnard exhibition spread over two floors of the museum - a Mediterranean holiday for the eyes. Paintings are arranged in chronological order, so you follow Bonnard's progress from his involvement with the "Nabis" (prophets) movement in 1889, when he and fellow students at the Academie sneaked out to see the impressionist paintings their professors shunned. The painter Edouard Vuillard was among the friends whom Bonnard met there. By chance, L'Annonciade museum in Saint-Tropez is holding a much-praised exhibition of Vuillard's work until October 1st.

The range of greens in Bonnard's early landscapes - often compared to Corot's - is almost Irish. The Nabis wanted, as the poet Mallarme wrote, "to suggest rather than to say" and advocated painting in grey tones. Bonnard's friends teased him about his interest in Japanese print-makers, especially Utamaro. They called him "the Japanese Nabi", and, indeed, in the introspective self-portraits of his later years, Bonnard looks oriental. His 1892 portrait of his cousin Berthe Schaedlin - whose parents refused to let her marry him - also shows a Japanese influence.

Bonnard once wrote that he "wanted not to paint life, but to make painting come alive". To do so, he had to use colour, and fortunately his love of colour quickly triumphed over abstract theories. "Colours pulled at me and I almost unconsciously sacrificed form to them," Bonnard wrote in 1909. Gauguin was the painter he admired most, and his colours - but not his everyday life subjects - owe a great deal to Gauguin. Bonnard made extensive use of purple, which had gone out of fashion, and liked to juxtapose related colours: yellow and orange, red and purple. The results are incredibly bright, but never violent. He carefully studied the effects of weather and light, writing in his notebook that "in fine but cool weather, there is vermilion in the orange-toned shadows and purple in the greys".

Perhaps the finest example of Bonnard's talent as a colourist is the almost tropical Dark Nude, painted between 1941 and 1946, the year before his death. The picture is warmer than the well-known, Degas-like bathing scenes of Bonnard's companion -- ultimately wife - of 49 years, Marthe Boursin. Although the early paintings of Marthe were sensual, they were transformed by her obsession with washing and the suicide of Bonnard's mistress Renee Monchaty. In the later Marthe paintings - only one of which is shown at the Maillol - she appears chalky, anaemic.

Dina Vierny's Pygmalion-like mentor Maillol lent his favourite model to his old friends Matisse and Bonnard. It was Vierny who posed for Dark Nude around the time of Marthe Bonnard's death in 1942, and the painting still belongs to her. She recalls that for the first week he was painting her, Bonnard did not say a word. When Vierny finally asked him why he was so silent, he talked unreservedly about painting, telling her how he always returned to a canvas, sometimes over an eight-year period.

After Aristide Maillol died in 1944, Vierny and Bonnard saw one another often until Bonnard also died three years later, at the age of 80. They went to the Salon d'Automne together, to admire works by Maillol and Bonnard. "All of a sudden I saw Bonnard pull some paint and a brush from his pocket and start touching up his paintings, which no longer belonged to him," Vierny recounts now. "I said, `Bonnard, what are you doing? We're going to be arrested!' `Be the lookout!' he told me."

Pierre Bonnard is at the Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol, 61 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris until October 15th, every day except Tuesday, from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. The exhibition is open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays.