Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia

Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia

Posted by Ellen Reilly on 10th Mar 2016

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present a rare opportunity to see the work of Pierre Bonnard at the Legion of Honor. Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia features more than 70 works on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The exhibition spans the artist’s career, including his early Nabi masterpieces, intimate interior scenes, his landscapes, and his great decorative commissions. This is the first major showing of Bonnard’s work in 60 years. The Legion is the sole venue.

Influenced by Gauguin, the artist group called Les Nabis, and the Japanese aesthetic, Bonnard’s work alternates between the themes and techniques of the Impressionists and the abstract visual modes of modernism. His complex and beautiful paintings show daily life—ordinary and intimate—described in a riot of color speckled with light and juxtaposed patterns. The still lifes are disheveled, the perspectives are playful, figures appear partly on the edge of canvases. Photography was a new technology in 1890. Snapshots of Bonnard’s friends—Monet, Vuillard, his wife Marthe—taken with his Kodak camera provided visual references for his paintings.

I especially admire the four-seasonal panels “Women in the Garden“ with their delightful pattern-on-patterns; his intimate interiors in rich palettes of raspberry, aqua and yellow; and the deep hues of “Twilight: The Croquet Game.“ If I could take one painting home, it would be “Almond Trees in Bloom.”

“Bonnard’s arcadia is filled with poetry, wit, color and warmth,” says Esther Bell, curator in charge of European paintings. “This selection of highlights from his career will make clear the artist’s important role in the history of French modernism.”

Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia at the Legion of Honor, 

through May 15, 2016.

Image credits

(top to bottom)

Pierre Bonnard, "Nude in an Interior," 1935. Oil on canvas. 134 x 69.2 cm. National Gallery of Art © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Pierre Bonnard, "The Work Table," 1926-37. Oil on canvas. 121.9 x 91.4 cm. National Gallery of Art © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Pierre Bonnard, "Women in the Garden: Woman in Dress with White Dots," 1890-1891. Distemper on paper mounted on canvas. 160.5 x 48 cm. Musée d'Orsay © 

Pierre Bonnard, "View of Le Cannet," 1927. Oil on canvas, decorative panel. 242.3 x 242 cm. Musée Bonnard © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris