Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard (born October 3, 1867, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France—died January 23, 1947, Le Cannet) was a French painter and printmaker, a member of the group of artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest colourists of modern art. His characteristically intimate, sunlit domestic interiors and still lifes include The Dining Room (1913) and Bowl of Fruit (c. 1933).

After taking his baccalaureate, in which he distinguished himself in classics, Bonnard studied law at the insistence of his father, and for a short time in 1888 he worked in a government office. In the meantime he attended the École des Beaux-Arts, but, failing to win the Prix de Rome (a prize to study at the French Academy in Rome), he transferred to the Académie Julian, where he came into contact with some of the major figures of the new artistic generation—Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, and Félix Vallotton. In 1890, after a year’s military service, he shared a studio in Montmartre with Denis and Vuillard. Later they were joined by the theatrical producer Aurélien Lugné-Poë, with whom Bonnard collaborated on productions for the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, in Paris. At this time he became influenced by Japanese prints, which had earlier attracted the Impressionists.

During the 1890s Bonnard became one of the leading members of the Nabis, a group of artists who specialized in painting intimate domestic scenes as well as decorative curvilinear compositions akin to those produced by painters of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement. Bonnard’s pictures of charming interiors lighted by oil lamps, nudes on voluptuous beds, and Montmartre scenes made him a recorder of France’s Belle Époque. It was typical of his humour and taste for urban life at the time that he illustrated Petites scènes familières and Petit solfège illustré (1893), written by his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse, and executed the lithograph series Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (“Aspects of Paris Life”), which was issued by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1899. He also contributed illustrations to the celebrated avant-garde review La Revue blanche. A new phase in book illustration was inaugurated with Bonnard’s decoration of the pages in Paul Verlaine’s book of Symbolist poetry, Parallèlement, published by Vollard in 1900. He undertook the illustration of other books during the 1900s.

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Bonnard’s ability as a large-scale decorator is sometimes overlooked, in view of his more quiet, domestic paintings in the Intimist style. But about 1906 he painted Pleasure, Study, Play, and the Voyage, a series of four decorations made to resemble tapestries, for the salon of Misia Natanson, the wife of one of the editors of La Revue blanche. These pictures show that he was an heir to the French grand tradition of pictorial design that may be traced to Charles Le Brun, the director of all artistic activity under Louis XIV, and François Boucher, the most fashionable painter in the mid-18th century.

By about 1908 Bonnard’s Intimist period had concluded. A picture such as Nude Against the Light (1908) was painted not only on a bigger scale but also with broader and more colouristic effects. Because of his increasing interest in landscape painting, he had begun painting scenes in northern France. In 1910 he discovered the south of France, and he became the magical painter of this region. The Mediterranean was considered by many of the period to be a source of French civilization. Bonnard was eager to emphasize the connections between his art and France’s classical heritage. This was evident in the pose of certain of his figures, which hark back to ancient Hellenistic sculpture. He was also enamoured of the colouristic tradition of the 16th-century Venetian school. The Abduction of Europa (1919), for example, is in a direct line of descent from the work of Titian.

The subjects of Bonnard’s pictures are simple, but the means by which he rendered such familiar themes as a table laden with fruit or a sun-drenched landscape show that he was one of the most subtle masters of his day; he was particularly fascinated with tricks of perspective, as the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne had been. In The Dining Room (1913), for example, he employed different levels of perspective and varied the transitions of tone, from warm to cool.

By about 1915 Bonnard realized that he had tended to sacrifice form for colour, so from that point until the late 1920s he painted nudes that reflect a new concern for structure without losing their strong colour values. In the 1920s he undertook a series of paintings on one of his most famous themes—a nude in a bath. From the end of the 1920s onward, the subject matter of his pictures hardly varied—still lifes, searching self-portraits, seascapes at Saint-Tropez on the Riviera, and views of his garden at Le Cannet, near Cannes, where he had moved in 1925 after marrying his model and companion of 30 years, Maria Boursin. These are paintings intense with colour.

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The chronological order of Bonnard’s paintings is difficult to determine, for he would make sketches in pencil or colour and then use them as the basis for several pictures on which he would work simultaneously. When working in the studio, he would rely on his memory of the subject and constantly retouch the surface, building up a mosaic of colours. It is impossible, therefore, to give more than approximate dates for many of his works. In 1944 Bonnard illustrated a group of early letters, which were published in facsimile under the appropriate title of Correspondances. Formes et couleurs.