Harry Abrams, $60

Review by Dan Rosen

(CNN) -- Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a painter of private times, catching moments in the life of people, gardens, and objects with a never ending attention that makes us look, just as he looked, at these paintings again and again. This book catalogues the latest exhibit of Bonnard, originated at the Tate in London and traveling to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The plates are wonderful to look at, decipher, absorb, and then do it all again.

Sarah Whitfield, the overall curator for the show, and John Elderfield, the MOMA curator, have each contributed an essay to the volume. Start with the paintings. The essays are worthwhile and strive mightily to share the authors insights with the reader, but they are inevitably fall into artspeak and their wisdom comes slowly and with repeated reading, just like the experience of viewing a Bonnard canvas.

Whitfield's essay focus on biography, the origin of Bonnard's aesthetic, the dichotomies in the work, and his relationship with him model, companion, and eventual wife, Marthe de Meligny. Bonnard is a painter who developed according to his own path; it is as if history did not happen around him. The detailed chronology in the back of the book, which records such things as the make of Bonnard's first car, hardly mentions such minor events as the Dreyfus Affair, Cubism, Surrealism, or the First and Second World War. But then again, none of these things really mattered to Bonnard's art.

What did matter, Whitfield says, was looking closely at what was at hand, attention to the surface of the canvas, filling the canvas with meaning in every part while crowding none of it, fidelity to the memory of objects instead of to the objects themselves, the importance of the total composition over its parts, and the play of light as it reveals and re-reveals objects and effects in the painting.

Elderfield's essay is mainly concerned with the organization of a Bonnard canvas and how that organization directs our experience of the painting. He lays particular stress on Bonnard's technique of painting from memory and the notion that Bonnard's subject matter is perception of the world. Much of Elderfield's discussion is couched in the terminology of the science of perception, going so far as to discuss the rods and cones of the eye, foveal vision, and the relative camouflage merits of long wavelength colors. But he surfaces frequently to give nice summaries of his argument. His discussion of individual paintings really helps you see them attentively.

The book includes 112 plates from the exhibition, in roughly chronological order. Bonnard had a habit of reworking canvases over many years, so it is sometimes difficult to date a particular piece. Most plates have a biographical sketch and provenance associated with it. A nice feature is that the usual blank space around these descriptions is often filled with comparison paintings from other artists, sources for the work, or sketches and earlier drafts Bonnard made for the piece. Several of the longer pieces could have been turned sideways for better effect, while the only list of the plates is buried in the index.

The Bonnard show continues at MOMA through October 13, 1998.

Dan Rosen is a Ph.D. student living in Atlanta.