I really dig when I find a ‘new’ artist, in this case Frenchman Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). Naturally I have no idea how I stumbled upon him, but this painting spoke to me:
c. 1923
Bonnard provided a bridge between impressionism and the abstraction explored by post-impressionists. While in law school, Bonnard took art classes at the Académie Julian in Paris before being accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met fellow Frenchman Édouard Vuillard and continued practicing impressionism. Like Vuillard, Bonnard frequently painted interior scenes, usually of women in a workplace, at home, or in a garden.
Bonnard is known for his intense use of color. His fondness for depicting intimate scenes of everyday life, has led to him being called an Intimist; his wife Marthe was often the subject over the course of several decades. She may be seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal, or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub.
Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes:“I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.”
He worked on numerous canvases simultaneously, which he tacked onto the walls of his small studio. In this way, he could more freely determine the shape of a painting; “It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose.”
One of the strongest influences on Bonnard’s colors, almost melting together, is the later style of Renoir, who lived in the south of France and whom Bonnard often visited in the years leading up to Renoir’s death in 1919.
Although Bonnard avoided public attention, his work sold well during his life. Reviewing a retrospective of Bonnard’s work in Paris in 1947, critic Christian Zervos assessed the artist in terms of his relationship to Impressionism, and found him wanting. “In Bonnard’s work,” he wrote, “Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline.” In response, the great Henri Matisse wrote: “I maintain that Bonnard is a great artist for our time and, naturally, for posterity.”
Bonnard has been described as “the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters. “When he imagines a basket of fruit as a heap of emeralds and rubies and diamonds, he does so with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”* -Jed Perl
Bonnard continued to paint landscapes until the very end of his life. He responded fervently to the extraordinary foliage that surrounded his house. The red rooftops of Cannes and the Mediterranean beyond were often subjects.
In 2014, the painting La femme aux Deux Fauteuils (Woman with Two Armchairs), with an estimated value of around €600,000 ($760,000) which had been stolen in London in 1970, was discovered in Italy.
In 1947 he finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Blossom, a week before his death in his cottage on the French Riviera. MOMA organized a posthumous retrospective of Bonnard’s work in 1948.
* https://newrepublic.com/article/63142/complicated-bliss
