Pierre Bonnard

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(b Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, 3 Oct 1867; d Le Cannet, 27 Jan 1947). French painter, printmaker and photographer. He is known particularly for the decorative qualities of his paintings and his individual use of colour. During his life he was associated with other artists, Edouard Vuillard being a good friend, and he was a member of the NABIS.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was one of the most original and consummate colorists of the first half of the 20th century and one of the few great painters of the period to remain unaffected by cubism.

Pierre Bonnard was born at Fontenay-aux-Roses on Oct. 13, 1867. After a false start as a law student, he began to paint in earnest at the École des Beaux-Arts. He failed to qualify for the Rome Prize competition, and in 1888 he began to spend more time at the less formal Académie Julian.

The Nabis

At the Académie, Bonnard met Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, and Ker Xavier Roussel, who banded together as an artistic brotherhood by 1890 and named themselves the "Nabis," a word derived from the Hebrew nebiim (prophets). This name appropriately reflected the occult and esoteric interests of the group, which met regularly at Ranson's studio. Sérusier had shown them a picture which he had painted under Paul Gauguin's direction in 1888 and which embodied the synthesist principles developed at Pont-Aven (Brittany) by Gauguin and Émile Bernard. In 1890 Denis summed up those principles in the journal Art et critique, which contained the famous dictum: "Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors which have been arranged in a given order."

Within the group Bonnard was known as "the Japonizing Nabi," a reference to his flat, linear, and playful style, rich in a kind of freehand pattern. Bonnard and Vuillard were the least doctrinaire members of the group. Although Bonnard accepted the basic notions of his friends relative to the flat surface, it was his visual humor, sly and gently mocking, as well as his irrepressible delight in worldly activities, which distinguished his work from theirs. Good examples of Bonnard's style at this time are Woman with Rabbit (1891) and the Croquet Game (1892).

In 1891 Bonnard began to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants and at the galleries of Le Barc de Boutteville, a dealer who represented the Nabis as a group. Bonnard's first one-man show was held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1896. In addition to easel paintings, Bonnard executed decorative screens, posters (France Champagne, 1889-1890; La Revue-blanche, 1894; L'Estampe et l'affiche, 1896), book illustrations (Marie by Nansen, 1897-1899; Verlaine's Parallèlement, 1900; Daphnis and Chloe, 1902; Renard's Histoires naturelles, 1904), lithographs (notably the set Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, 1895), sculpture, and stage sets.

Mature Work

After the turn of the century Bonnard adopted a lighter palette, and his art, at least superficially, approached that of the impressionists. His continued respect for the flat surface, however, and the intermittent arbitrariness of his colors and form distortions produced an essentially more abstract style. He began to make regular trips to the south of France after 1910, and he bought a house at Le Cannet in 1925, the year of his marriage to Maria Boursin (Marthe), his companion and model since 1895. The Mediterranean light had an ever-increasing effect on his paintings, which, although strongly sensual in character, never lack an underlying structure and are brilliant exploitations of the decorative possibilities of the picture plane (for example, the Riviera and the Breakfast Room).

Bonnard visited the United States in 1926, when he served as a member of the jury of the Carnegie International Competition. His late works are freer in expression and more luminous than ever. During World War II he lived in Le Cannet, and there he died on Jan. 23, 1947. Bonnard was mild in manner and in appearance. He had a reputation for witty commentary and a sharp critical sense.

Further Reading

An excellent study of Bonnard in English is John Rewald, Pierre Bonnard (1948). More richly illustrated are Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard: Biographical and Critical Study (1945; trans. 1964), and André Fermigier, Pierre Bonnard (1969).

Additional Sources

Watkins, Nicholas, Bonnard, London: Phaidon Press, 1994.

Cogniat, Raymond, Bonnard, New York: Crown Publishers, 1988?, 1979.

Bonnard, Pierre (1867-1947), French painter. Like Vuillard, also a painter of colourful, riotously decorative canvases in the intimiste style, Bonnard began photographing during the 1890s. Exploiting the ease of the Kodak, he favoured themes common to his paintings: domestic interiors, family scenes, table settings, and bathers. Distortions caused by the Kodak's simple lens suggest a formal relation to Bonnard's distinctive handling of space in his paintings. Photography, like Japanese prints and Art Nouveau, confirmed new approaches to the representation of space.

— Kevin Moore

Bibliography

• Heilbrun, F., and Néagu, P., Pierre Bonnard: Photographs and Paintings, trans. D. Cullinane (1988)

Bonnard, Pierre (1867-1947). In the artistic and literary circles of the French Symbolist milieu, Bonnard was known chiefly as a decorative artist (posters, drawings, and lithographs for the Revue blanche, 1894; lithographs and wood engravings for Verlaine's Parallèlement, 1900). In his early paintings of landscapes and domestic scenes, he sought to integrate the Impressionist colour surface and Japanese composition, but following his discovery in 1909 of the light of southern France, he devoted himself to the expression of vibrant and subtle harmonies of colour.

— James Kearns

Quotes:

"Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly."

The Dining Room in the Country, 1913

For the commune in Bourgogne, France, see Bonnard, Yonne.

Pierre Bonnard (3 October 1867 – 23 January 1947) was a French painter and printmaker, a founding member of Les Nabis.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Notes 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine. He led a happy and careless youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating and practising as a barrister briefly. However, he had also attended art classes on the side, and soon decided to become an artist.

In 1891 he met Toulouse-Lautrec and began showing his work at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. His first show was at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896.

In his twenties he was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France.

Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brushmarks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. His wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. She is 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. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, and many still lifes which usually depict flowers and fruit.

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.^[1]

In 1938 there was a major exhibition of his work along with Vuillard's at the Art Institute of Chicago. He finished his last painting, The Almond Tree in Flower, a week before his death in his cottage on La Route de Serra Capeou near Le Cannet, on the French Riviera, in 1947. 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 eightieth birthday.

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.

Notes

1. ^ Cowling and Mundy, 1990, p. 38.

References

• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-854-37043-X
• Frèches-Thory, Claire, & Perucchi-Petry, Ursula, ed.: Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich & Grand Palais, Paris & Prestel, Munich 1993 ISBN 3791319698 (German), (French)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre Bonnard

• Biography and some pictures
• Guggenheim museum
• Met Exhibition - Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors January 27, 2009–April 19, 2009
• "Complicated Bliss" by Jed Perl, The New Republic, 1 April 2009
• Works by Pierre Bonnard (public domain in Canada)

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