Pablo Picasso called Bonnard "hideous" and "not really a modern painter - a decadent, the end of an old idea". Of course not everyone was supportive of Bonnard. The French government offered him the Légion d'honneur, but the painter, ever modest, refused. Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov obsessively collected Bonnard along with Matisse. but made wholly his own:īy the end of the 1920s Bonnard was one of the most successful and in-demand painters in Europe. These works exhibited a delicacy of touch, a fluidity learned from Toulouse-Latrec and art-nouveau posters, and a bold sense of design clearly inspired by some of the notions of space seen in Japanese art. focusing upon friends, family, lovers and wives in domestic scenes or landscapes as seen out their bedroom windows or in the back yards.Īt this period Bonnard's strongest output tended to be his graphic works: prints and posters. The subject matter favored tended to be intimate in nature. They loved medieval art, old decorative frescoes, book illustrations, tapestries, and poster designs. The Nabis were deeply influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin and openly embraced the "abstract" and "decorative" aspects of art. Bonnard admitted that his father was not at all keen on his love of art.īonnard, along with several other students of the Académie Julian, including Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, and Paul Sérusier began exhibiting together beginning in 1890 as the Nabis (Hebrew for Prophets). For years he struggled to maintain a public government position as a prosecutor in the courts while spending all the time possible painting. He studied philosophy, rhetoric, Latin, Greek, and Modern Literature with an eye to a law degree. all of these effects of paint congealed into an image of such light and color and poetry that I was immediately seduced.īonnard was born into an upper middle-class family. just as the warp and waft in a weaving resulted in the even surface of the tapestry. the surface as a whole read as a fluid, even entity. Up close blobs and swirls danced across the surface next to passages of the merest whisper of paint or even gaps where the bare canvas shone through. The variety of paint handling was phenomenal. The paintings in real life were far beyond anything I had imagined. An older student whose work I greatly admired insisted I see Bonnard in person at the Phillips Collection, and so I made the long hike across town. The year before I graduated from art school I had the chance to travel to Washington D.C. something about the work appealed to me and I kept coming back to look at his paintings in the reproductions in art books and magazine.
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