… maybe to acquire new ones.
Bonnard put himself in his work, a thumb, a knee. Which self (as Whitman says, we are multitudes)? Michael Kimmelman writes in The Accidental Masterpiece
to make explicit that he’s present, sometimes he paints his knee or thumb in a corner of the picture–like a fumbling photographer who gets in the way of his snapshot, except that Bonnard was cunning and purposeful; he took just such a photograph, in 1908, of Marthe kneeling in a zinc tub, sponge-bathing herself, her body a blurry silhouette against the light, with his hands jutting into the picture, looming in the foreground.
Is that why he does — to make explicit? I have been thinking about this since seeing the Bonnard paintings at the Phillips Collection (D.C.) last month and coming across that Barot poem.
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I recently got a camera phone, and I keep getting my fingers in the way when I take photos with it. I erased most of them, but I kept one because it amused me.
I guess it offers a certain sense of humanity to it–a kind of “I was there” unprofessional quality. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to make explict.