Title: Pierre Bonnard The Late Still Lifes and Interiors

ISBN 10: 1588393089 ISBN 13: 9781588393081

Synopsis

Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist's daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French painter, illustrator, and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of colour. He was a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, and his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, and the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. He was a leading figure in the transition from impressionism to modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colours and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.

Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist's daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly coloured baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language.

The more than 75 paintings, drawings, watercolours, and gouaches in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all painted between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism.

About this edition

• ISBN 10: 1588393089
• ISBN 13: 9781588393081
• Binding: Unknown Binding