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Pierre Bonnard
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Pierre Bonnard,
french painter and printmaker, member of the group of
artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of
theIntimists; 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 illustratedPetites 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 tothe 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.
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 aseries 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.
The chronological order of Bonnard's paintings is
difficult todetermine, 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.
Denys Sutton
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