What about the MoMA painting, The Breakfast Room of 1930-31? When you first see the picture, I think that your eyes tend to slide up and down around the center panel between the landscape out of the window and the objects on the table. At first, it doesn't quite occur to you that you don't recognize what some of these objects are because you're not really paying attention to them. For example, what is this thing in the bottom-right hand corner? A breadbasket, perhaps. And what about that pile of something in the mid-right margin? I've still not figured it out. Bonnard again teases you around different fixation points--in this case, to delay perception of the woman in the left margin, seeming thus to allude to her elusiveness and unavailability. She's very much caught in that space, just as she's caught in the bathtub in Nude in the Bath and Small Dog of 1941-46. This is his wife Marthe, isn't it? Yes, and you'll notice that she is always the same age - which is to say, ageless - in his paintings, which were, in fact, mainly painted from memory. In the case of this great bathtub painting, Marthe in fact had died before its completion. So it is even more, a remembrance. It was Bonnard's last painting of her. He himself died the year after it was completed. ©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York