BONNARD, Pierre

The painting is signed lower left: Bonnard.

In street scenes of the 1890s, such as the 12 lithographs and cover published by Vollard as Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (1899), no part of the bustling life of Paris escaped his eye: the children on their way to school in their hooded cloaks; the policeman; the cabs waiting along the boulevard with their scrawny horses; the covert movements of those passing women who lift their long skirts before stepping up on to a pavement or adjust a beribboned hat.

The picture shows one of the 12 lithographs of the series.

In 1912, Pierre Bonnard bought a country house called Ma Roulotte (“My Caravan”) at Vernonnet, a small town on the Seine. This painting shows the dining room there, with cats perching on the chairs and Marthe de M�ligny, the artist’s wife, leaning on the windowsill. Bonnard, who considered himself “the last of the Impressionists,” emphasized the expressive qualities of bright colours and loose brushstrokes in this picture. He united the interior with the exterior through the open window and door and linked the forms by bathing them in related hues. Unlike the Impressionists, however, Bonnard painted entirely from memory. And like the Symbolists, he wanted his works to reflect his subjective response to the subject.

Following a period spent producing Parisian scenes in the style of �douard Vuillard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard virtually reinvented his art around 1905. The artist’s new emphasis on large-scale compositions, bold forms, and brilliant colours shows his awareness of the work of his contemporaries Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as does his focus on Arcadian landscapes, a theme he had not previously explored.

Part of a series of four canvases painted for his dealers, Josse and Gaston Bernheim, between 1916 and 1920, Earthly Paradise demonstrates Bonnard’s new, daring investigations of light, colour, and space. Here the artist used foliage to create a proscenium-like arch for a drama involving a brooding Adam and recumbent Eve. The contrast Bonnard established between the figures seems to follow a tradition in which the female, presented as essentially sexual, is connected with nature, while the male, essentially intellectual, is able to transcend the earthly. Heightening the image’s ambiguity is an array of animals, including birds, a monkey, rabbits, and a serpent (here reduced to a garden snake). This less-than-Edenic paradise may reflect the artist’s response to the destruction of Europe during World War I, which was still raging when he began the painting.

Pierre Bonnard was a member of the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophets”), a Parisian Post-Impressionist group whose aesthetic influences included Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and whose goals called for a greater connection between art and everyday life through a synthesis of fine art and ordinary subjects. The democratic nature of printmaking was therefore ideally suited to Bonnard, as the multiple impressions of a print could be experienced by a relatively broad audience. Additionally, he benefited from technical innovations in colour lithography, his primary print medium, which had led to renewed interest in printmaking in the 1890s.

This poster advertisement for Debray Champagne was the artist’s first great success, it appeared on the walls of Paris in March 1891. In strong contrast to the bright and colourful posters of Jules Ch�ret, France-Champagne was composed in three colours with black predominant. Its effect lay in the lettering, which was hand-drawn rather than produced from printed characters, and in the suggestive curves of the woman’s extended arm. The only straight line was provided by a closed fan underlining the name of the brand of champagne being advertised. Toulouse-Lautrec was so impressed by this poster that he decided to enter this field himself. Bonnard introduced him to his own printer, Ancourt.

Bonnard created more than one hundred twenty editioned projects between 1891 and 1947, including designs for theatre programs, exhibition announcements, sheet music, book and journal illustration, and individual prints. His first poster commission, an advertisement for champagne, appeared in 1891 and was an immediate success. This was eventually followed by nine other posters, including one for La Revue blanche, a Parisian periodical. This and Bonnard’s other posters bear many of the same design hallmarks: unmodulated colour, a playful depiction of flattened space, and decorative handling of silhouettes and textures.

La Revue blanche was a French art and literary magazine run between 1889 and 1903. It was founded in Li�ge in 1889 and run by the Natanson brothers. In 1891, the magazine moved to Paris, where it rivalled the Mercure de France, hence its name, which marked the difference with the Mercure’s purple cover. Some of the greatest writers and artists of the time were its collaborators.

By the early years of the new century, the Nabis had separated, and Bonnard travelled, visiting England, Belgium, Holland, Spain and Italy, often accompanied by Vuillard. Together they explored museums and new landscapes. It was a period of reflection, discovery and research. Although there were new movements to observe in Paris alone (in 1905 Fauvism; from 1907-08 Cubism), Bonnard always maintained a distance and independence from them, though not out of hostility. His use of colour, in particular, distinguished his work at a time when the Fauves were applying it in almost violent hues, and the Cubists were treating it in greys and earth colours. In comparison with the avant-garde, Bonnard appeared to be reverting to Impressionism. In Nude in ‘contre-jour’, in the interweaving of colours, like wools, he seemed to employ the techniques of Renoir and Monet.

While Bonnard’s paintings take up the themes and sometimes the techniques of the Impressionists, they are very different in composition and treatment: Nude in ‘contre-jour’, like many of his later pictures, includes a small mirror, a device that allows him to represent space within a flat idiom.

Bonnard graduated when he was 21, and he was sworn in as a barrister in 1889. In the meantime, he was already drawing and painting, having enrolled at the Acad�mie Julian, Paris, in 1887. In an attractive Self-portrait of 1889 (private collection), he depicted himself not in barrister’s robes but as a young painter, holding a palette.

This lithograph is printed in pink, blue, brown and reddish ochre on paper. It depicts a street corner seen from above, with numerous figures. It is from an album of twelve lithographs, published by Ambroise Vollard, Paris.

The painting is a portrait of Mme Claude Terrasse at the age of 20. It is signed at the bottom left: P BONNARD 1892.

During the period 1890-92, Gauguin and Japan were the major influences on Bonnard’s work, affecting both the imagery and decorative character of his work, from The Parade Ground (1890; private collection), a humorous souvenir of a military period, up to the great composition of the Croquet Game (1892; Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris), which depicts his family playing in the park at Grand-Lemps.

The painting represents the garden of the family home, in Grand-Lemps, in Is�re. It depicts the artist’s family playing croquet. We can recognize from left to right the painter’s father, his sister Andr�e, his brother-in-law, the musician Claude Terrasse in the company of a friend. In the background, five young women dressed in white dance a frenzied round.

The contrast between the frieze effect in the foreground and the animated scene in the background is not the only audacity of the painting. The croquet players’ clothes with their checkered prints seem to have no thickness, juxtaposed as if glued to the foliage. The subject of this painting is impressionistic: the pleasures of a beautiful summer in the countryside. However, Bonnard “the very Japanese nabi”, as his friends called him, treats the scene in flat tints and ornaments, no doubt inspired by the Japanese prints of which he was very fond. The whole is a pretext for the declension of monochrome of greens into the weft of which the white silhouettes are inserted.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Bonnard continued developing his own style. He often organized compositions around strong verticals or horizontals determined by the framework of walls, doors, windows or pieces of furniture, as in The Dressing-table.

During the period 1890-92 Gauguin and Japan were the major influences on Bonnard’s work, affecting both the imagery and decorative character of his work, from The Parade Ground (1890; private collection), a humorous souvenir of a military period, up to the great composition of the Croquet Party (1892; Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris), which depicts his family playing in the park at Grand-Lemps.

During the period 1890-92, Gauguin and Japan were the major influences on Bonnard’s work, affecting both the imagery and decorative character of his work. This period included the four decorative panels of Women in the Garden.

Bonnard thought of the panels as decoration of the screen. He exhibited them separately in 1891 in the Salon of Independent under the name “Decorative Panel”. The artist explained his decision that in his vision, the works were more pictures than screens.

The Japonisme boom that spread among the artists and writers of the second half of the 19th century reflected the profound influence exerted by Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and other Japanese arts on the premier artists of the day. Bonnard, one of the central members of the Nabis group, was not excluded from this trend. He was given the apt nickname of “Le Nabi-japonard” by his contemporaries for his admiration for Japanese art. He owned numerous Ukiyo-e prints, including the works of Hiroshige, Toyokuni, Kunisada, and Kuniyoshi, and stated, “The walls of my room are inundated with these gaudy woodblock prints.” For Bonnard, who discarded the traditional European expression of three-dimensional space and tended towards decorative, idealized flattened compositions, Japanese woodblock prints were the object of wonder.

Young Girl Sitting with a Rabbit, painted in 1891, represents a turning point in Bonnard’s early creative work. The decorative qualities characterizing his Nabis period are clearly visible here, such as the vertical composition, the S-shaped curve of the girl’s form, the decorative forms and the two-dimensional spatial composition. All of these elements reflect the strong influence of Japanese art.