Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard (; 3 October 186723 January 1947) was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.

Early life and education

thumb|left|A Barracks Scene by Pierre Bonnard (probably about 1890). His first [[Les Nabis|Nabi painting, a souvenir of his brief military service]]

Pierre Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine on 3 October 1867. His mother, Élisabeth Mertzdorff, was from Alsace. His father, Eugène Bonnard, was from the Dauphiné, and was a senior official in the French Ministry of War. He had a brother, Charles, and a sister, Andrée, who in 1890 married the composer Claude Terrasse.

He received his education in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Lycée Charlemagne in Vanves. He showed a talent for drawing and water colors, as well as caricatures. He painted frequently in the gardens of his parents' country home at Le Grand-Lemps near La Côte-Saint-André in the Dauphiné. He also showed a strong interest in literature. He received his baccalaureate in the classics, and, to satisfy his father, between 1886 and 1887 earned his license in law, and began practicing as a lawyer in 1888.

While he was studying law, he attended art classes at the Académie Julian in Paris. At the Académie Julian he met his future friends and fellow artists, Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Gabriel Ibels and Paul Ranson.

In 1888, Bonnard was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met Édouard Vuillard and Ker Xavier Roussel. He also sold his first commercial work of art, a design for a poster for France-Champagne, which helped him convince his family that he could make a living as an artist. His first studio was on the rue Lechapelais.

Early career (1888-1899)

The Nabis

Although Bonnard had received his license to practice law in 1888, he failed in the examination for entering the official registry of lawyers. After the summer holidays, he joined with his friends from the Academy Julian to form Les Nabis, an informal group of artists with different styles and philosophies but common artistic ambitions. Bonnard was then entirely unaware of the Impressionist painters, or of Gauguin and other new painters.

Some of the Nabis had highly religious, philosophical or mystical approaches to their paintings, but Bonnard remained more cheerful and unaffiliated. The painter-writer Aurelien Lugné-Poe, who shared a studio at 28 rue Pigalle with Bonnard and Vuillard, later wrote: "Pierre Bonnard was the humorist among us; his nonchalant gaiety, and humor expressed in his productions, of which the decorative spirit always preserved a sort of satire, from which he later departed."

In 1891, Bonnard met Toulouse-Lautrec and, in December 1891, showed his work at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In the same year, Bonnard also began an association with La Revue Blanche, for which he and Édouard Vuillard designed a frontispiece. In March 1891, his work was displayed with the work of the other Nabis at the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville.

Bonnard used the model of Japanese kakemono scroll art—long, vertical panels—in his series of paintings Women in the garden (1890–91), now in the Museé d'Orsay. Originally designed to appear together as a single screen, Bonnard decided to display Women in the garden as four separate decorative panels. The female forms are reduced to flat silhouettes, and there is no rendering of depth in the picture. The faces are turned away from the viewer and the pictures are entirely dominated by the colors and bold patterns of the costumes and the backgrounds. The models are his sister Andreé and his cousin Berthe Schaedin. Bonnard often pictured women in checkered blouses, a design he said he had discovered in Japanese prints. He also took part in an exhibition with the other Nabis at the Bernheim Jeaune gallery. He presented nine paintings at the Salon des Independents in 1901. In 1905, he produced a series of nudes and of portraits, and in 1906 had a personal exposition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. In 1908, he illustrated a book of poetry by Octave Mirbeau, and made his first long stay in the South of France, at the home of the painter Manguin in Saint-Tropez. in 1909 and, in 1911, began a series of decorative panels, called Méditerranée, for the Russian art patron Ivan Morozov. In June 1910 he painted a view of St. Valery-sur-Somme, showing a boat moored in high tide as well an image of the Chemin-de-fer.

During the years of the First World War, Bonnard concentrated on nudes and portraits, and in 1920 completed a series of large compositions, including La Pastorale, Méditterranée, La Paradis Terreste and Paysage de Ville. His reputation in the French art establishment was secure; in 1918 he was selected, along with Renoir, as an honorary President of the Association of Young French Artists.

In 1947 he finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Blossom, a week before his death in his cottage on La Route de Serra Capeou near Le Cannet, on the French Riviera. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a posthumous retrospective of Bonnard's work in 1948, although originally it was meant to be a celebration of the artist's 80th birthday.

File:Pierre Bonnard, c.1940-1946, Nude in Bathtub, oil on canvas, 122.56 × 150.50 cm, Carnegie Museum of Art.jpg|Nude in the Bath and Small Dog, (c. 1941–1946) Carnegie Museum of Art

Bemberg Fondation Toulouse - Dernier autoportrait de Pierre Bonnard de 1945 - 56x46.jpg|Last self-portrait (1945) Bemberg Fondation

File:PierreBonnard-1946-Stairs with Mimosa.png|Stairs with Mimosa (1946)

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Graphic arts

Bonnard wrote, "Notre génération a toujours cherché les rapports de l'art avec la vie" (Our generation always was searching for connections between art and life). Bonnard and the other Nabis were particularly interested in integrating their art into popular forms, such as posters, journal covers and illustrations, and engravings in books, as well as into ordinary household decoration, in the form of murals, painted screens, textiles, tapestries, furniture, glass and dishes.

At the beginning of his career, Bonnard designed posters for a French champagne firm, for which he gained public attention. He later produced many sets of engravings illustrating the works of the avant-garde authors of his time.

File:BonnardFranceChampagne.jpg|Poster for France-Champagne by Pierre Bonnard (1891), which made him known outside the art world

File:Bonnard - Met Collection - DT8576.jpg|Poster for the review Blanche, Metropolitan Museum also published in Les Maîtres de l'Affiche

File:Les Parisiennes cph.3g10009.jpg|Les Parisiens, lithograph (1893)

File:Bonnard - Met Collection - DP824352.jpg|Illustration for a music textbook written by his brother-in-law, composer Claude Terrasse (1893)

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Method

thumb|Dining Room in the Country (1913), oil on canvas, [[Minneapolis Institute of Arts]]

Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brush marks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. Bonnard's fondness for depicting intimate scenes of everyday life, has led to him being called an "Intimist"; his wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. "I have all my subjects to hand," he said, "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."

Although Bonnard avoided public attention, his work sold well during his life. At the time of his death, his reputation had been eclipsed by subsequent avant-garde developments in the art world; reviewing a retrospective of Bonnard's work in Paris in 1947, 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, Henri Matisse wrote: "I maintain that Bonnard is a great artist for our time and, naturally, for posterity."

Bonnard was described, by his own friend and historians, as a man of "quiet temperament" and one who was unobtrusively independent. His life was relatively free from "the tensions and reversals of untoward circumstance." It has been suggested that: "Like Daumier, whose life knew little serenity, Bonnard produced a work during his sixty years' activity that follows an even line of development."

Bonnard has been described as "the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters", and the unusual vantage points of his compositions rely less on traditional modes of pictorial structure than voluptuous color, poetic allusions and visual wit. Identified as a late practitioner of Impressionism in the early 20thcentury, he has since been recognized for his unique use of color and his complex imagery. "It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard," writes Roberta Smith, "there's also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."

Two major exhibitions of Bonnard's work took place in 1998: February through May at the Tate Gallery in London, and from June through October at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 2009, the exhibition "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors" was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reviewing the exhibition for the magazine The New Republic, Jed Perl wrote:

"Bonnard is the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters. What sustains him is not traditional ideas of pictorial structure and order, but rather some unique combination of visual taste, psychological insight, and poetic feeling. He also has a quality that might be characterized as perceptual wit—an instinct for what will work in a painting. Almost invariably he recognizes the precise point where his voluptuousness may be getting out of hand, where he needs to introduce an ironic note. Bonnard's wit has everything to do with the eccentric nature of his compositions. He finds it funny to sneak a figure into a corner, or have a cat staring out at the viewer. His metaphoric caprices have a comic edge, as when he turns a figure into a pattern in the wallpaper. And 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."

Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900, was a 2021-2022 exhibition organized by the Portland Art Museum, Portland Oregon (exhibited 23 October 2021–23 January 2022) and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, (exhibited 1 July–19 September 2021) featuring the work of Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Félix Vallotton. The exhibition catalog was written by Mary Weaver Chapin and Heather Lemonedes Brown

Bonnard’s Worlds, was a 2023-2024 retrospective co-organized and exhibited by the Kimbell Art Museum (exhibited 5 November 2023–28 January 2024) and The Phillips Collection (exhibited 2 March–2 June 2024). The exhibition catalog was written by George T. M. Shackelford

Bonnard's record price in a public sale was for Terrasse à Vernon, sold by Christie's in 2011 for €8,485,287 (£7,014,200).

In 2014, the painting La femme aux Deux Fauteuils (Woman with Two Armchairs), with an estimated value of around €600,000 (£497,000), which had been stolen in London in 1970, was discovered in Italy. The painting, together with a work by Paul Gauguin known as Fruit on a Table with a Small Dog had been bought by a Fiat employee in 1975, at a railway lost-property sale, for 45,000 lira (about £32).

Bonnard features heavily in the 2005 Booker prize winning novel, The Sea by John Banville. In the novel, the protagonist and art historian Max Morden is writing a book about Bonnard and discusses the painter's life and work throughout.

Bonnard is played by Vincent Macaigne and Marthe by Cécile de France in the 2023 French film directed by Martin Provost Bonnard, Pierre and Marthe, which focuses on the couple's romance. The movie premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival .

Selected collections

Bonnard's work is in many museum collections, especially in France, also including the following American ones:

Art Institute of Chicago
Baltimore Museum of Art
Cleveland Museum of Art
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art
National Gallery of Art
The Phillips Collection

References and sources

References

Sources

Amory, Dita, ed. (2009). Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brodskaya, Nathalia (2011). Bonnard. Parkstone International.
Cogeval, Guy (2015). Bonnard. Paris: Hazan, Malakoff.
Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery.
Frèches-Thory, Claire, & Perucchi-Petry, Ursula, ed.: Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich & Grand Palais, Paris & Prestel, Munich 1993
Hyman, Timothy (1998). Bonnard. London: Thames & Hudson.
Smith, Roberta. Bonnard Late in Life, Searching for the Light, The New York Times, January 29, 2009
Turner, Elizabeth Hutton (2002). Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late. London: Phillip Wilson.
Whitfield, Sarah; Elderfield, John (1998). Bonnard. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

External links

"Complicated Bliss" by Jed Perl, The New Republic, 1 April 2009
Works by Pierre Bonnard (public domain in Canada)
Exhibition catalogue, Pierre Bonnard, Jill Newhouse Gallery, 4 - 26 May 2023
Exhibition catalogue, Pierre Bonnard: Affinities, Jill Newhouse Gallery (Curated by Karen Wilkin), 27 February - 4 March 2018