Pierre Bonnard

French painter

• Born: October 3, 1867
• Birthplace: Fontenay-aux-Roses, France
• Died: January 23, 1947
• Place of death: Le Cannet, France

One of the most independent of post-Impressionist artists, Bonnard created a style and an artistic vision of art as an enchanting celebration of life. This style and vision, at one and the same time, freed him from his Impressionist predecessors and carried on their tradition of art as a loving record of human and natural beauty.

Early Life

Pierre Bonnard (pyehr baw-nahr) was born in an exclusive suburb of Paris at the home of his father, who was an important official in the French war ministry. He was sent to expensive private schools and began his senior studies in the classics and philosophy. He was not a particularly good student, but his father had ambitions for him to enter the civil service. He studied law, as his father wished him to do, but he was interested in art and registered as well in a private art school, the Académie Julian. He also studied for a time at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he proved too undisciplined and spent much of his time sketching in the Paris museums with another young artist, Édouard Vuillard, whose career was to be closely tied to that of Bonnard. In 1899, he failed his oral law exams, but his father helped him by arranging employment for him in an office. Only his sale of a poster for a champagne advertisement persuaded his reluctant father that he should have a chance to become a professional artist. He continued to work at the Académie Julian, where he developed associations with other young artists, including Vuillard, and the group were to form themselves, somewhat informally and very loosely, into an association that came to be known as the Nabis (a lighthearted word meaning “prophets”), who discussed and began to experiment with new ways of painting and drawing. In 1890, Bonnard took his turn, as was the law of the day, in the French army, but he returned to Paris to begin his career as an artist in earnest, sharing a studio with Vuillard and other Nabis at 28 rue Pigalle.

Life’s Work

The Nabis believed that the Impressionist revolution in French art, which had been in force through the 1860’s, 1870’s, and 1880’s, was inadequate for their needs as young artists. The Impressionists had felt the same about their predecessors, repudiating the high finish and restricted subject matter of early nineteenth century painting for a loose, vivacious, improvisatory recording of day-to-day life. Their battle for recognition was still going on in the early 1890’s, but Bonnard’s associates were strongly influenced by Paul Gauguin, who had turned away from his Impressionist contemporaries to painting in which the message became important, in which works carried spiritual or social symbols, and in which the spontaneous recording of minute-to-minute reality, rapidly painted with deliberately loose draftsmanship and visible brush marks (the common marks of Impressionism), were rejected for a deliberate patterning, a determination to flatten the canvas in ways that were strongly influenced by Japanese drawing and painting. The more serious members of the group followed Gauguin zealously into what he called “Symbolist” painting.

Bonnard, however, stubbornly hung back from total commitment to Gauguin’s preaching of the new faith. A tall, slender, wispy man, who was to look very much the same until his death, Bonnard seemed anything but the wild romantic figure of the artist, and he was noted for his whimsical sense of humor and good nature. He was not, however, easy to convince, and he never gave way on his own ideas about how he wanted to paint. He picked up the enthusiasm for Japanese art, and it began to show up immediately in his work; yet he never seemed interested in using his painting for the purpose of portentous symbolic comments on life.

Always modest about his talents, Bonnard accepted the Nabis’ idea that the painter was not to record the minute details of reality but to represent on canvas his personal, imaginative response to that reality. The message that came through in Bonnard’s case was a tender celebration of ordinary, mundane life, which linked him to the Impressionists, even if his style was clearly much more rigorously patterned than was the Impressionist inclination. He was, in that sense, the most Impressionist of the post-Impressionists. He was not reluctant to use his gift in minor ways; he continued to do posters and design covers for sheet music, and he became particularly successful as a book illustrator. Tiffany’s of New York asked him to design a stained-glass window. He knew Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was doing similar work, and there is often a similarity in their posters, although Bonnard’s rendering of Paris nightlife is less intimate and less melancholy. He had his first one-man show in 1896; during this time, his color range was rather narrow, strongly leaning toward low-keyed blacks and blues. The double influence of Gauguin and the Japanese was very strong, particularly in his lack of bright, natural colors and in the flatness of his design, but his own charmingly innocent humor pervades his work.

By the late 1890’s, he was established, and he entered a loose contractual arrangement with the dealer Bernheim-Jeunes, which provided him with a steady income. At the turn of the century an obvious change occurred in his work: There was an explosion of color, in the tradition of the Impressionists, and a similar flooding of incident and detail into his paintings of common life. The Japanese habit of “layering” their works, putting one subject over another with little concern for the European habit of connecting the subject lines with careful perspectival gradation, was particularly attractive to Bonnard. His paintings are often difficult on first viewing to understand, since background, middle ground, and foreground subjects seem to be equally important and often on the same plane.

Without much theorizing, Bonnard continued to break the rules of painting in several ways. He often deliberately broke perspectival obligations, distorted, and used a kind of flicking painterly shorthand to suggest objects in his works. He rejected the Impressionist insistence on working from real life; even his landscapes, seemingly so immediate and improvisatory, were painted in the studio, an act of supreme Impressionist heresy. He was to say that the presence of a subject intimidated him and prevented him from expressing himself freely.

In the first decade of the century, Bonnard began to spend more time in the country, in the first instance in a group of villages outside Paris. In 1910, he went to the south of France and was deeply moved by its brash, lush fecundity, a perfect mirror image of the rich density of his paintings. From that time forward, he moved on a regular basis between Paris, a house outside Paris on the Seine very near Claude Monet’s studio at Giverny, and a small house in the south, near Cannes.

He was always inclined to pick at his work, never entirely confident of his technique. There was a period in which he concentrated on drawing, bringing a linearity back into his work, but by the 1920’s his softening of the line, his natural inclination to blur outlines, and a new spurt of ebullient color took over and established his final stylistic position.

There was about Bonnard’s work, particularly in the later years, a kind of shambling tenderness and sweet-natured charm that worked even in his long series of intimate paintings of nudes, which are often compared to those of Edgar Degas. Like Degas, Bonnard catches his subjects at intimate moments and at odd angles, but his nudes seem less sexually vibrant, less erotically charged with voyeurism. There is a gentleness about his work, a modesty even in his wittiness, which is all of a piece with his peculiar habit of being able to paint anywhere. Often in hotel rooms, he would simply pin a canvas on the wall and set to work.

Bonnard was admired from early in his career but not considered a major figure, and his international reputation began substantially only in the 1920’s. He lived a quiet life, working steadily through the 1930’s, moving back and forth between the north and the south of France. He avoided Paris during World War II and produced a considerable number of watercolors and gouaches during that period, since oils were hard to obtain during the war. In 1925, he had married Maria Boursin, who had been his companion since their youth and was often a subject of his paintings; in 1940, she died. He continued to work steadily, with the work becoming, when possible, more richly colorful than ever. He died in his house at Le Cannet, near Cannes, on January 23, 1947.

Significance

Bonnard began his career with a group of young rebels determined to free themselves from the powerful influence of Impressionism, and that impetus was to explode into several different ways of painting in the twentieth century, many of serious consequence to the history of painting. Bonnard, however, made his own way, not through any group or any particular theoretical structure but through a fastidious picking and choosing of those aspects of the new ideas and the old that were consistent with his own character as an artist. He, in a sense, invented himself as an artist by developing a private style quite unlike that of anyone else, which included touches of Gauguin’s Symbolist theory, large swatches of Japanese design, the Impressionist love for the mingling of nature at its most beautiful and human beings at their moments of quiet innocence, and his own very subtly sophisticated amusement at life. Bonnard was not a member of any school or the leader of any group but was a kind of odd man out who developed a personal style that is immediately recognizable as beholden to many but peculiarly his own. He proved that the single artist could resist the power of movements and make his own way in the face of enthusiasms that demanded attention if he had talent and an idea of what art was meant to be, however individual. In the practice of his singularity, he produced some of the best paintings of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Callen, Anthea. Techniques of the Impressionists. London: New Burlington Books, 1987. The best introduction to Bonnard is through an understanding of technique, particularly that of the Impressionists, since he is so like them in the way he uses paint. This book has an excellent introduction to the subject.

Farr, Dennis, and John House. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Courtauld Collection. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. An exhibition catalog that contains an interesting discussion of three works by Bonnard.

Rewald, John. Pierre Bonnard. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948. Prepared for a Bonnard exhibition, this work contains an excellent, short critical biography of the painter and generous illustrations of Bonnard’s drawings, paintings, and lithographs, and photographs of Bonnard and his surroundings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962. Bonnard is only a minor figure in this work, but it is an intensive study of how the major painters of the late nineteenth century resisted the Impressionists and established themselves as something else, often of equal importance. Helps to show Bonnard’s individuality.

Soby, James Thrall, et al. Bonnard and His Environment. New York: Doubleday, 1964. Another good, short critical biography and a rich full-color selection of his paintings.

Terrasse, Antoine. Bonnard: Shimmering Color. Translated by Laurel Hirsch. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Bonnard’s grandnephew describes the artist’s work. Contains 173 illustrations, 112 of them in full color.

Turner, Elizabeth Hutton. Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late. Washington, D.C.: Philip Watson and the Phillips Collection, 2002. Examines both the early Nabi or Symbolist period of Bonnard’s career and his later Impressionist or color period to chart his artistic development and vision. Includes illustrations of 130 of his works.

Zutter, Jörg, ed. Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. This book, which accompanied an exhibition of Bonnard’s work, contains 110 illustrations to chart the evolution of his art.