I think it’s about time we all admitted it: Pierre Bonnard was no dab hand at feet. The French post-impressionist painter and current subject of The Colour of Memory exhibition at Tate Modern, London, draws feet like pink rakes. There are, of course, things that Bonnard is truly great at: colour, evoking memory, breasts and torsos. Feet are not his forte.
It was visiting the show that led me to realise the painter was fond of an ingenious – and unintentionally hilarious – solution: kitten heels. Mostly only seen these days on Theresa May, they are present in the majority of the nudes in the Tate’s curation.
See here, I am not exaggerating:
Pierre Bonnard is excellent at colour but as @mlle_elle and I could not stop laughing about, was awful at faces & feet. His way to get around this was to badly draw Theresa May kitten heels on all of his nudes. To wit: pic.twitter.com/gZmoNFmit8
— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) February 24, 2019
Given the present-day rarity of the kitten heel, even its visual representation threw me. Of worthier comment, most of Bonnard’s nudes – predominantly of his lover and, later, wife Marthe de Meligny – are of her fresh from the bath, or in the bath, or chilling in the bathroom. Now, I wouldn’t want to suggest that kitten heels in such a setting are incongruous, but what the hell? Do you wear kitten heels after bathing?
It was my colleague, Elle Hunt, who initially noticed the ruse. I had been aware of how bad Bonnard was at painting dogs and faces – something the Guardian’s chief art critic Adrian Searle also picked out in his review (“faces in the crowd are often monstrous or ill-formed”) – but the feet as streaks of bacon and the shoe coverups had passed me by. I asked Elle to elaborate on her assessment. “He started off earnestly attempting the feet, though they turned out looking like bath toys. Then years later he has this brainwave about putting all his nudes in kitten heels. It’s a stroke of genius in terms of getting around your weaknesses and even making them seem like flair. Except, he wasn’t very good at kitten heels, either.”
This theory seemed to me about right. But critic Jonathan Jones thought we were being a little harsh. “Feet are very hard – even the old masters had trouble with them,” he told me. “I guess I’d defend Bonnard and suggest that he’s being modernist and provocative in painting all those kitten heels. He’s not alone. The first ‘modern’ nude, Édouard Manet’s Olympia, wears kitten-heeled slippers along with her black necklace.” (It’s unclear whether this is because Manet could not draw clavicles).
“That was painted in 1863 and caused a huge scandal because Olympia is not a pure idealised classical nude: she is a naked contemporary woman and – shocked Parisians assumed at the time – a prostitute. So, in modern art, putting shoes on a nude is a way of openly sexualising nakedness. Or to put it another way, Bonnard was kinky about kitten heels.”
I get this. Most of us are aware of the link between women’s shoes and sex. I’ve often thought of it in Guy Bourdin’s work, in particular his shoe campaign for Charles Jourdan in the 1970s. His photographs, even outside that campaign, frequently featured models in erotic poses wearing bold red or gloss black stilettos.
And it was Jourdan’s protege Christian Louboutin who said: “What is sexual in a high heel is the arch of the foot. Because it is exactly the position of a woman’s foot when she orgasms. So, putting your foot in a heel, you are putting yourself in a possibly orgasmic situation.”
This doesn’t quite work with kitten heels, however. Though Jones points to the masturbation sketches by Tracey Emin, in which the reclining figure is also wearing shoes. My main beef is that kitten heels are the least sexy shoe of all time. There is nothing aphrodisiacal about an LK Bennett number that your aunt might wear with nude tights. And, as Elle points out, it’s also because Bonnard is so bad at drawing them. Occasionally, the nudes are shod in what would become known as ballet flats, giving off a Camden in 2009 vibe. (He also liked to paint women putting their stockings on).
The thing is, sometimes Bonnard pulled the feet off (metaphorically speaking). Each time I saw evidence of this, my heart sang. I was so proud of him. Here, for instance, in his painting of a woman in a bath tub:
So, perhaps, he just needed more practice? Although Jones defends him here, too: “His paintings are subjective not objective.” I would never argue that Francis Bacon or Picasso couldn’t draw facial features. It doesn’t seem right that the feet and kitten heels are so badly rendered when Bonnard is perfect at the curve of a breast. Incidentally, Picasso was not a fan of Bonnard, saying of his work: “That’s not painting, what he does … it’s a potpourri of indecision.”
There was only one thing left for me to do in my quest to find out where and when the kitten heels first walked into Bonnard’s works. I emailed Tate Modern. Reader, they did not get back to me. Still, Bonnard is respected for his brightly coloured landscapes influenced by Paul Gauguin and evocative domestic scenes. Some even rate him over his contemporary, Henri Matisse. Considering he drew toes as half-chewed baguettes, that is quite a feat.
• Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory is at Tate Modern, London, until 6 May.
