Biography of the Day: Pierre Bonnard

[altmariusart]

Pierre Bonnard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre Bonnard, Self-portrait, circa 1889.

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

 Biography

Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine. He led a happy and carefree 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.

 Gallery

Works by Pierre Bonnard

Les Parisiennes 1893 lithograph   Two Dogs in a Deserted Street, 1894   The Letter, 1906   The Dining Room in the Country, 1913

 Notes

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

 References

• Hyman, Timothy (1998) Bonnard. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0500203101
• 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, 200...
• "Complicated Bliss" by Jed Perl, The New Republic, 1 April 2009
• Works by Pierre Bonnard (public domain in Canada)