Pierre Bonnard

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.

Born in 1867, French Postimpressionist artist Pierre Bonnard was, with Henri Matisse, one of the greatest colorists of the early 20th century. As a painter, he preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference to capture the spirit of a moment and express it through his distinctive handling of color and innovative sense of composition. This accessible and highly illustrated introduction to his life and work, published to accompany a major Tate exhibition, offers readers a special insight into the popular artist and his practice.

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.

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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 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 was the leader of a group of Post-Impressionist painters who called themselves the Nabis, from the Hebrew word meaning “prophet”. Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel and Denis, the most distinguished of the Nabis, revolutionised decorative painting during one of the richest periods in the history of French painting. Bonnard’s works are striking for their strong colours and candidness.