Pierre Bonnard

Why this artist matters now

Pierre Bonnard painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits, and intimate domestic interiors in which color and surface consistently overtook subject matter as the primary formal concern. A founding member of Les Nabis, his early work absorbed the flat decorative patterning of Paul Gauguin and the compositional compression of Hokusai and Japanese printmaking. Over a career spanning the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth, he became a pivotal figure in the passage from Impressionism toward Modernism, deploying bold, non-naturalistic color to give his canvases an almost hallucinatory warmth. His paintings held at the Musée d'Orsay represent the sustained intensity of a practice built on domestic proximity and chromatic invention.

Source: Christies Artsy · Trust score: 100% · Updated 1mo ago