One of the characteristics of artists like me who’ve been around a long time is the aplomb with which we assert our taste, as well as our willingness to venture out on a limb even when it comes to opining about famous artists. At a certain point (after about 20 years of wrestling first-hand with putting paint onto canvas), painters switch from sentences that begin with the hesitant words, “I’m not really all that fond of so-and-so’s work,” to more categorical assertions, such as, “So-and-so is a terrible painter.” When young artists assume this attitude, it’s a bad thing, of course. They’re unnecessarily blocking their own development. Mature artists who don’t have it lack any conviction.

Accompanied by my friend from graduate school days, Edith Newhall (she’s the art critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and is a painter in her own right), I recently wandered through the Bonnard exhibition at the Met (“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors”; closes April 19th). We both approached the exhibition with no small bit of prejudice against Bonnard (who lived from 1867-1947). We weren’t as negative as Picasso (who called his work “piddling”) and certainly neither of us would go so far as to say Bonnard is terrible. It’s just that he’s one of those painters who seems to have never developed a style you can sink your teeth into and go ga-ga over, what with his multiple references to everybody else — a little Gauguin, a little Cézanne, a little Matisse, a little Vuillard — all squished together under a slather of impressionist light handled in a rather clumsy fashion.

A major exhibition devoted to Bonnard commands a painter’s respect, however. If nothing else, painters admire famous historical painters for having earned their places in the history books. We also admire them for their doggedness in the face of the uncertainty of painting’s meaning. And Bonnard is nothing if not dogged. The guy painted a gazillion paintings — an inordinate number of which centered on his wife Marthe lying in the bathtub. (Curiously, none of these famous bathtub paintings are in this exhibit.)

So with the feeling that Bonnard deserved his due, and that we should try again, Edie and I both pushed our noses up close to his pictures, the way mice approach cheese, in order to study his touch. And then we stepped back, in order to ponder the whole. We both tried, and we tried both ways, but our hearts weren’t swayed.

“His women are boneless,” Edie suddenly said, adding the observation that Bonnard “paints a lot like Vuillard.” It was a way of saying he didn’t really have his own style. She added that he had a photographic manner — meaning his accidental compositions seemed like haphazard snapshots.

Bonnard is certainly modern, and in multiple ways beyond his photographic sensibility — in his devotion to flatness and negative space, his all-out embrace of brilliant color, and in valuing deformation over obedience to the rules of naturalism. His modernism is also present in his complex portrayal (pretty-colored pictures by means of fairly ugly and clumsy shapes) of ordinary, daily life, the realm in which we all deceive ourselves into believing that existence will be forever.

And I’ll give Bonnard this, as well: He understands the first maxim of the painter. In nature, light creates color, whereas in painting color creates light. His color indeed suggests light. He also manages to include household pets in his pictures without succumbing to sentimentality — no small feat, if you think about it. In “The White Interior” (1932), the tail of the white and black spotted cat poking out from behind the table is both daring and darling.

But famous or not, Bonnard has serious problems. His compositions are frequently bottom heavy, and he’s addicted to what I call “filler” — meaningless applications of paint that come about when there is no unifying painter’s principle. How a painter paints “air” is the biggest challenge for any figurative painter, and Bonnard isn’t great at it.

More problematic are Bonnard’s brush marks, which are gnarly. Lacking deftness or any painterly moves that suggest the speed of light itself, they work against the light his color manages to capture. If this gnarly quality came from trying to define volume and weight in an expressive way (Van Gogh) or a radical new way (Cézanne), one would forgive him. It would resonate as the artist’s “sincerity.” But even an amateur can see that Bonnard isn’t interested in these things. He’s interested in rooms and the people and things in them bathed in morning or afternoon light.

As I said, I’m at the point in my life where my opinions about painting are for the most part formed — and, after this many years spent thinking about painting, pretty well informed. Around the edges, however, doubt eternally lurks, and I’m always working to keep myself open to surprises. Obviously, there are plenty who genuinely love Bonnard. I tried, yet again, but I don’t.

But about that cat’s tail I mentioned. That cat’s tail keeps coming back to me. It’s almost — not quite, but almost — enough to make me change my mind about Bonnard.