Bonnard, Pierre

Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late

Pierre Bonnard: The Work of Art, Suspending Time

Among those painters who incontestably left their mark on twentieth-century art, Bonnard rises to the top again and again. Museums, scholars and viewers regularly return to his oeuvre for reinterpretation, passionate and contradictory, of what it means to be Modern. In having followed a very personal calling--literally and figuratively interior, particularly compared to the work of friends like Matisse--Bonnard created work as innovative as any of his contemporaries'. His recurring themes--the nude (both classical and erotic), the landscape, domestic life, and the self-portrait--evolve with him from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from Paris to the south of France, alive with constant reinvention. Although for Bonnard the subject was always important, his work navigates a sophisticated dialectic between the givens of perception and memory, between the image before our eyes and all that it suggests. This substantial reference includes work from the Hermitage and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, which sponsored its publication. Contributors include Yve-Alain Bois, Sarah Whitfield, and Georges Roque. Photographs from Dina Verny and Henri Cartier-Bresson among others document the era and Bonnard's models as he saw them.

Bonnard: Colour Library (Phaidon Colour Library)

Bonnard at Le Cannet

Bonnard: Shimmering Color

With a text by the artist's grandnephew, Bonnard brings a special intimacy to the exuberant, beautiful domestic interiors, pastoral landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of the French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), whose vibrant, colorful palette drew streams of art lovers to a recent retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

173 illustrations, 112 in full color

Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature

The French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a successful painter, draughtsman, photographer, printmaker, illustrator, and interior designer and his works continue to surprise and overwhelm new generations of art lovers. This handsome catalogue brings together more than 110 paintings, drawings, lithographs, and photographs, concentrating on works from both public and private collections, and focusing on the evolution of Bonnard's artistic career in the twentieth century.

It follows the artist's stylistic and iconographic development, giving a comprehensive view of Bonnard's career from his early Nabi works of 1890-1900 to his large decorations of 1905-1912 and his various nudes, portraits and landscapes of the 1920s and 1930s. The book closes with a group of stunning paintings and works on paper--predominantly still lifes, sublime nudes, portraits, and Mediterranean landscapes--created in the late 1930s through World War II.

Pierre Bonnard offers new insights into one of the most complex yet highly consistent artists of the twentieth century whose work was and still is influential on modern painters. From a contemporary perspective, Bonnard appears to many as a profoundly radical artist whose works have an extraordinary power to fascinate and inspire the viewer.

Bonnard (World of Art)

Bonnard found early fame among the Nabis, the radical young disciples of Gauguin, and went on with Vuillard to create a new intimist art of psychologically charged interiors. But from 1900 he turned back towards Impressionism, and his art recreates moments of heightened subjectivity, color, and space. His greatest works explore his claustrophobic relationship with Marthe, his wife; in his seventies he also completed some of the most poignant self-portraits in Western art. This new account shows how these beautiful and lyrical pictures sometimes emerged from terrible circumstances. As Bonnard himself wrote shortly before his death in 1947, "one does not always sing out of happiness." Shaped in the 1890s by Mallarm and Symbolism, by Jarry and anarchism, and by the philosophy of Bergson, Bonnard's complex art took on full conviction only in the 1920s. His reassessment over the past thirty years has centered on these extraordinary late pictures, which are among the most enduring images of the twentieth century.

Bonnard

It seems somehow revolutionary that a turquoise-blue painting graces the cover of Bonnard, the catalog accompanying a 1998 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The color of the endpapers--deep yellow--tells readers that even the book designers know with which end of the color spectrum most viewers associate this sensuous painter. The translucent-looking, sun-struck, golden woman in the bathtub--the artist's wife and favorite model--is so emblazoned on our memories that it takes an exhibition like the one documented in this book to remind viewers of Bonnard's extraordinary range as a colorist.

The early, intimate, Nabi paintings are often dark, with figures that stand out like candle flames in shadowy interiors. But Bonnard's use of umber, sienna, and various blacks--occasionally in the shape of a dachshund--is forever part of what makes those brilliant reds and oranges sing. Even 60 years into his career, the painter gave full range to his palette, balancing the most highly colored canvasses with others of pale, soft grays. Those readers who have been succored on the 1984 Phillips Collection catalogue will find MoMA's new one every bit as nourishing.

Bonnard Colour & Light

Bonnard from A to Z (Artists from A to Z)

This wholly delightful book, with beautiful pictures, graceful design, and a deft and telling text, is one of four in a new series for children that includes volumes on Chagall and Matisse. Each book lightly skips through the alphabet, teaching a bit of French along the way--A is for "Avocat" (lawyer)--as it tells the life story of a great artist in brief but vivid glimpses. (The books are translated from the French.) The writing is designed to draw readers (and young listeners) in: "January, 1887. It is extremely cold in the Law School. To warm himself, the professor, sporting an unruly mustache, paces back and forth while he lectures. In the fourth row, a thin, serious student takes notes. He is 20 years old and his name is Pierre--Pierre Bonnard." This you-are-there reportage style sweeps toward the inevitable: Bonnard, whose notebooks contain "more drawings than notes," enrolls in art school.

The Harry Potter books have amply demonstrated that children appreciate mellifluous writing, and those who also love art will find both here. In spite of the abbreviated format, no essential is left out. In the Bonnard alphabet, for example, M is for Marthe, who "does not yet know that by entering into Pierre's life she will penetrate to the heart of his work. Henceforth, she will be his only model." Adults who become entranced by this elementary series may go on to more complex biographies of Bonnard, such as Timothy Hyman's. But for a mesmerizing first glimpse into the life of this painter of color and light, Bonnard from A to Z is a treasure. --Peggy Moorman