James Picard - Artist of October 2005

***October 2005***

Pierre Bonnard
October 3, 1867 – January 23, 1947

Pierre Bonnard was born in Paris, and though he showed an aptitude for creating throughout his childhood, he ended up studying law at the insistence of his father (a senior civil servant), attending art classes in his spare time. By 1887, after graduating with a law degree, he enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris and was later admitted to the L’ecole de Beaux-Arts and though a practising lawyer, his focus remained primarily on art.

By the late 1880s, Bonnard was a founding member of the Nabis (Hebrew for ‘prophet’), a small group of artists including Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, whose works were influenced by the paintings of Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet. Bonnard, inspired by Japanese prints, used simplification of form and bold use of bright colours. Bonnard exhibited with the Nabis until they disbanded in 1900.

In 1891 he met Toulouse-Lautrec and began showing his work at the Salon des Indépendants. By 1894, however, he turned to more sombre colours, restricting his paintings to small, natural scenes, where people were caught unguarded. He said: "There is a formula that perfectly fits painting: lots of little lies for the sake of one big truth."

In 1903, Bonnard participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in the Vienna Secession, and from 1906 he was represented by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. He traveled abroad extensively and worked at various locations in Normandy, the Seine valley, and the south of France. (He finally moved to Cannes in 1925.)

Though he began to get recognition for his work, some critics, and even fellow artists, often found his work old-fashioned, because of his commitment to figuration and the narrow scope of his themes. Picasso was quoted as saying Bonnard’s art was “a pot-pourri of indecision”.

From the end of the 1920's until his death, Bonnard's subject matter hardly varied, his wife Marthe, who was at times referred to as a nagging, neurotic shrew, posed in the garden, dining room and while in the bathtub, where she spent hours of the day and night. His seascapes, still lifes and views of his garden at Le Cannet were created all with an intense color that remained on his palette until the end of his life.

Bonnard’s wife died in 1942 and Pierre continued to paint alone at Le Cannet where he eventually died in January of 1947.

Following his death, The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major exhibition of the work of Bonnard and Vuillard in 1933, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Bonnard retrospectives in 1946 and 1964.

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