Published to coincide with an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard's work at the Tate Gallery in London (12th February - 17th May 1998) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (24th June - 29th September 1998), this is a concise illustrated survey of Bonnard's use of colour and light. It reviews his life and work, and sets out to show, through an analysis of key works, how his technique and working methods developed over 50 years.
The letters exchanged between Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse from 1925 to 1946 attest to a 40-year friendship between two of the most important artists of the 20th century. This volume documents an extraordinary correspondence between two great masters who respected and liked one another.
An unparalleled reassessment of Pierre Bonnard, exploring his paintings, drawings, photography, and prints As one of the founders of the post-Impressionist group the Nabis, French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) is frequently seen as a transitional figure between the Impressionists and modernists. This beautifully illustrated book offers a fresh interpretation, revealing the artist's central concern with expanding representation beyond the limits of natural vision. The result is a new understanding not only of Bonnard but of modernism itself. Exploring how Bonnard's dazzling domestic scenes and landscapes reimagine perception, embodiment, and the passage of time, Lucy Whelan characterizes him as a painter of unusual insight in his consideration of the relationship between vision and representation. The book covers Bonnard's paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints, with special focus on his later works from the 1920s to his death in 1947, and draws on an in-depth study of the artist's diaries, interviews, and other written sources. A groundbreaking reassessment, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision presents an artist engaged in avant-garde forms of experimentation who complicated vision in innovative ways.
"The vibrant late paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) are considered by many to be among his finest achievements. Working in a small converted bedroom of his villa in the south of France, Bonnard suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand-usually everyday scenes taken from his immediate surroundings, such as the dining room table being set for breakfast, or a jug of flowers perched on the mantelpiece - Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he preferred to make pencil sketches in small diaries and then rely on these, along with his memory, once in the studio." "This volume, which accompanies the first exhibition to focus on the interior and related still-life imagery from the last decades of Bonnard's long career, presents more than seventy-five paintings, drawings, and works on paper, many of them rarely seen in public and in some cases, little known. Although Bonnard's legacy may be removed from the succession of trends that today we consider the foundation of modernism, his contribution to French art in the early decades of the twentieth century is far more profound than history has generally acknowledged. In their insightful essays and catalogue entries the authors bring fresh critical perspectives to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard's reputation and to his place within the narrative of twentieth-century art."--Jacket
Pierre Bonnard is often considered a painter of idyllic scenes, replete with colour and serenity, however, this view overlooks many of the most striking aspects of Bonnard's oeuvre. Over the course of his career, Bonnard worked within - often expanding and challenging - many genres and techniqeus. Alternating between the traditions of Impressionism and the abstract visual modes of modernism, Bonnard addressed elements present within many movements in order to synthesize a world worthy of his utopian vision. As this volume reveals, Bonnard's work evolved radically over the course of his career. Includes in its pages are illustrations of well-known examples alongside rarely exhibited pieces, which represent the many thematic and stylistic compositions of Bonnard's work.
The natural world in all its richness, glimpsed variously in the house, the barnyard, and the garden, in ponds and streams, and at large in the woods and the fields, including old friends like the dog, the cat, the cow, and the pig, along with more unusual and sometimes alarming characters such as the weasel, the dragonfly, snakes of several sorts, and even a whale, not to mention ants in their seeming infinitude and a single humble potato—all these and more are the subjects of what may well be the most deft and delightful book of literary miniatures ever written. In Jules Renard’s world, plants and animals not only feel but speak (one species, the swallow, appears to write Hebrew), and yet, for all the anthropomorphic wit and whimsy the author indulges in, they guard their mystery too. Sly, funny, and touching, Nature Stories, here beautifully rendered into English by Douglas Parmée and accompanied by the wonderful ink-brush images of Pierre Bonnard with which the book was originally published, is a literary classic of inexhaustible freshness.
In this beautifully illustrated book, the forty year friendship between Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard becomes a platform for new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde. "Long live painting!" With this rallying cry, Henri Matisse, greeted his colleague Pierre Bonnard on a 1925 postcard from Amsterdam. Widely considered two of the greatest painters of French modernism, they were united by a forty-year-long friendship and a keen appreciation of each other’s work. This catalogue offers fascinating insights into their artistic dialogue. Focusing throughout on their creative exchanges, it highlights their respective contributions to the development of modern art, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War. Comprising over 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, the book makes palpable the many intersections between their artistic visions, and investigates their shared interest in subjects such as interiors, still life, landscape, and the nude. Scholarly essays and thematic introductions to their oeuvres provide a wealth of information on the two colleagues and friends gained from their writings and correspondence as well as archival material. Another highlight is a series of iconic photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited both Matisse and Bonnard at their much-fabled houses in the South of France.
