Bonnard Pierre (1867 - 1947)
Pierre Bonnard {baw-nar'}, b. Oct. 3,
1867, d. Jan. 23, 1947, began his long
painting career in Paris in the early
1890s. He was one of the first artists to
use pure color in flat patterns enlivened
by decorative linear arabesques in
paintings, posters, and designs for
stained-glass windows and books. Together
with his friend Edouard Vuillard and the
other members of the group known as the
Nabis (Hebrew for "prophets"), he helped
establish a new, modern style of
decoration that was important for the
emergence of Art Nouveau in the late
1890s.
The paintings of Paul Gauguin and Claude
Monet done in the late 1880s were the
principal source for the new style of the
Nabis. Bonnard, "the very Japanese Nabi,"
also drew on Japanese prints for his
striking simplifications of form and his
bold use of bright colors. In 1894,
however, he turned to more somber colors
and restricted his subject matter to
intimate views of domestic life. When,
around 1900, he again began to use bright
hues, he adopted the impressionist broken
brushstroke and abandoned the linear
configurations of his earlier work.
Throughout the remainder of his career,
Bonnard continued and expanded the
impressionists' concern for depicting the
personal environment of the artist. His
naturalism, however, was merely a
starting point for striking innovations
in color and the construction of
perspective. After 1920 intense colors
dissolve forms yet celebrate the
painter's sensuous delight in the lush
southern French landscape and, above all,
the beauty of the female nude.
Bonnard's entire stylistic evolution
offers a transition from impressionism to
a coloristic, abstract art. Critics now
recognize the importance of Bonnard's
contribution to the development of
abstraction. During his lifetime,
however, they often found his work
old-fashioned, because of his commitment
to figuration and the narrow scope of his
themes. Dining Room on the Garden
(1934-35; Guggenheim Museum, New York) is
an excellent example of Bonnard's late
style.
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