Word: bonnard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brioche--but what is that oval yellowish object on the right of the tabletop? Forms sink against the light, and at first you hardly even see the ailing Marthe in her housecoat at the left edge of the painting, timidly holding her cup. Yet, as so often happens with Bonnard, under the ambiguous surface lies a rigorous structure. He jotted in his diary a reminder to seek "big forms, even in small formats." His still lifes, in particular, are marvels of marking and disposition, suffused with a beaming warmth that was the signature of Bonnard's memory at work...
...Bonnard's critics--including Picasso, who dismissed his art as "a potpourri of indecision"--have often made the mistake of treating Bonnard as a mere hedonist, with his beautiful color and apparent lack of conceptual underpinning. In this they have been wrong. There was nothing stupid or foolishly pleasurable about Bonnard's work. But Whitfield is right to see Bonnard as an elegiac artist: "He is not a painter of pleasure. He is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure...
...Bonnard began his career as a member of a young dissident group called the Nabis, or Prophets, that had formed in 1889 in Paris. They believed in taking art down to its essential flat patches of color, strong boundaries, tapestry-like abutments of form and a general emphasis on the decorative. Their prototypes came from Japanese prints and the influence of Paul Gauguin. And they had close ties to Symbolism. Their literary god was the poet Stephane Mallarme, who had conceived of poetry as a structure of words and absences: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help...
Like his artistic ancestor Chardin or his fellow Nabi Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard was an Intimist. He cared nothing for heroic or historical themes. He had no public life, and his diary was filled not with reflections on art, life or politics but with pencil sketches and occasional notes on the weather. Nor did art theory, avidly debated among some of his painter friends, interest him much...
...round face, her left foot scratching the inside of her right thigh like a cat. Sometimes she poses like an orthodox model--The Bathroom, 1908, where she seems transfigured by the wormy quivering of light and transparency that prevails in the room, is such an image. Sometimes Bonnard unobtrusively reuses the pose of a classical sculpture in rendering her body: the Medici Venus in Large Yellow Nude, 1931, or the Louvre's Hermaphrodite in Siesta, 1900. Quite often you have to look for her; she is on the margin of the painting or sunk in the background, as though half...