BONNARD, Pierre (Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1867 – Le Cannet 1947)
After an initial experience as a lawyer, Pierre Bonnard undertook his artistic career in 1887 studying at the Parisian Académie Julian where he met Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier. Captivated by Gauguin’s non-imitative mode of representation, Bonnard soon abandoned his early style, which recalled Corot’s Naturalism, and shifted to a personal experimentation of colours and surface renderings. Together with Sérusier, Denis, Ranson and Ibels, Bonnard founded the Nabis who proclaimed the use of arbitrary colours and flat surfaces. The group was also strongly influenced by Japanese graphic art. Vuillard and Roussel also became members of the group and exhibited with the others at the first Nabis show at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1891. That same year the artist contributed with nine works to the Salon des Indépendants, including the decorative panels Women in the Garden (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and participated in the exhibition Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes. In 1893 the artist met Maria Boursin who became his wife in 1925. Around that time, Bonnard embarked on the experimentation of different mediums such as posters and illustrations for books and magazines such as the Natanson’s La Revue Blanche. His first solo show was held in 1896 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel and in 1897, with the Nabis, his works were displayed at the gallery of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard who, that same year, published Bonnard’s illustrations of Verlaine’s poems collection Parallèlement. The Nabis were gradually disbanded around 1900 after a last exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. At the turn of the century, Bonnard extensively travelled with Vuillard across Europe, dedicating himself to a new period of reflection and artistic quest. Although the Parisian scene had experienced the rise of radical tendencies such as Fauvism and Cubism, Bonnard maintained his personal artistic independence and overall his own palette, closer to Impressionism than to the avant-garde abrupt chromatism. In 1903 Bonnard began to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne as well as starting to be regularly represented by the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Until the 20s, the artist kept researching his own artistic equilibrium producing works as Summer in Normandy (1912, Moscow, Pushkin Museum) and Pastoral Symphony or Countryside (1920, Paris, Bernheim-Jeune). From 1920 the artis’t talent had been lavishly recognised both in France and abroad as evidenced by his membership of the Carnegie International Jury and his New York exhibitions at the de Hauke Gallery in 1928 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930. Charles Terrasse, nephew of the artist, published a monograph of Bonnard in 1927. His last years were honoured by public success and a continuous production. The artist died in his house of Le Cannet in the South of France on 27 January 1947.
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