This leads me to one of the things I'd like to bring out in this interview: what you've written in the catalogue about what is happening optically, so that the work does become something more than a biographical visual experience. Let's consider The Provençal Jug of 1930. If you look directly at the picture, what do you see? Obviously, the still life. Have you noticed what's on the right hand side? Do you see how Bonnard attracts us there by that zigzag shape, and only after that do you see the hand and the arm? And then something very curious happens while you look at the zigzag and register the rest of the picture. Because peripheral vision has a lower resolving power than direct vision, the area around the jug develops volume and shape in a way that it doesn't when you look at it directly, when you read it as flat patches of paint. So Bonnard's paintings transform as you look at them, as he teases you around the surface. This encourages you to spend more time with the painting and savor it in different sorts of ways. In turn, you are caused to wonder, "What is Bonnard's point in encouraging this?" And you start to think, "Well, it does seem to evoke a sense of transitoriness and uncertainty in the visual environment, if what seems solid at one moment isn't at the next, or vice-versa. It's as if Bonnard offers two descriptions of the same thing in one painting." You come away with a sense that the world is somehow less than certain. ©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York