We are thus faced with a work process in two steps, where the end result is deferred until after completion of the painting per se--deferred, that is, until the final, decisive moment when the canvas is stretched, and the composition is "re-framed." This is not unlike Jackson Pollock's habit of rectifying the dimensions of his paintings after the fact by cropping some segments of a large composition to arrive at the finished work. And it is only through this final step that Bonnard allowed a painting that heretofore was just a fragment of a bigger field--the vertical field of the studio wall--to become the final work as we know it. While Bonnard was working on each fragment of a project whose scope went beyond every single one of its parts, his work consisted in the performance of exacting bodily movements. The process of going from one painting to another, and to the table where he mixed his colors on a plate, evokes Hans Namuth's famous photos of Pollock's dance-like "action" as he dripped paint on his unstretched canvas laid down on the floor. Instead of tackling a horizontal surface, however, Bonnard worked on a vertical one, though it was not the vertical window looking out onto the real world stemming out from the tradition of perspective. Instead, each canvas, with its edges curling up and the nails affirming the presence of the wall, recalls itself as a surface, speaks of itself and of the wall of which it is a part. ©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York