Word: bonnards
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pierre Bonnard called himself "the last impressionist," but in the throes of creation he was more like the first action painter. He would tack a huge canvas on a wall and, striding back and forth, begin jabbing spots of paint in a dozen places. After days of vigorous work, a nude emerged here, a still life there. Then he cut the paintings apart, stretched them into tambourines of jin gling color...
Whether or not Bonnard was behind or before his time, his retrospective show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art,-with 83 oils and 87 other works, establishes him as the distant witness of current...
French Milquetoast. Bonnard was headed halfheartedly for the law when, in 1890, he made a 100-france sale of a lithograph poster for a champagne merchant. Flat, clearly influenced by the vogue for Japanese prints, it showed a giddy damsel in bubbly billows. Its appearance on the kiosks of Paris caused Toulouse-Lautrec to seek Bonnard out; it was not until a year later that the sawed-off chronicler of Montmartre made his own first poster. The sale also persuaded Bonnard's father, a war ministry bureaucrat, to let his son pursue art as a career...
...thin slice of French Milquetoast in appearance, Bonnard fell into the celebrated company of Vuillard, Vallotton and Maillol. Gauguin was chief prophet, telling them to express what they saw in colors straight from the tube. If a shadow had a bluish look, said he, the painter should use pure ultramarine. A group called the Nabis, or prophets, gathered and asserted that the imitation of three dimensions was less vital than a blatant arrangement of lines and colors. That was art; the other was slavish copying. Bonnard became "the very Japanese Nabi" for his fascination with oriental asymmetry, ascending perspective...
Anatomical Outlaw. For a while, Bonnard was a flaneur and sketcher of Paris street life. Lithography, with its kinship to line drawing and its inherent limits of only a few undifferentiated colors, was Bonnard's proving ground. He embellished sheet music and illustrated the writings of Verlaine, Octave Mirbeau and Andre Gide. The flat stone's print only confirmed him as an outlaw toward perspective, modeling and rigorous anatomy...