Word: bonnards
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Then a yellow, 10-h.p. Renault opened Bonnard to rural beauty. He would motor through the countryside, stopping frequently to sketch. He fled Paris for Mediterranean country villas...
...found his true subject matter indoors. It was the domestic moment that caught his eye. Lazy, hazy days of summer-when the sun caressed the contours of a kitchen table, or of his basset hounds, or of his wife-provided Bonnard's book of hours. Critics called his work intimist. Unlike any artist since the 18th century's Chardin, he made home life into a universe...
Model Wife. Bonnard's indoor art thrived on women. He loved them in awkward, innocent postures, when they let down their shields of glamor. Women for Bonnard were his wife, Marthe de Meligny, a cute midinette he met when he was 28. When they were married 30 years later, he found out that she was not aristocratic, only plain Maria Boursin, but his love never left...
...that he painted oftenest (see following pages). Her presence borrowed color from the walls of her bath. While fauvism, cubism, even dadaism and surrealism bypassed Bonnard, he kept his eye on nature and his wife's place in it. To many, through the 1930s and 1940s, Bonnard was oldfashioned, a man preoccupied with outer nature rather than inner psychology. His art seemed wishy-washy, facile, banal in its apparent sentimentality...
Spectral Tapestries. But Bonnard was not concerned with psychology. "We can abstract beauty out of everything," he said. "A painting is a series of spots that are joined together and ultimately form the object over which the eye wanders without obstruction." Bonnard's spectral tapestries are a surface abstraction that invite the eye to play tourist. His imagery is so pleasing that few see the tricks of color and form that wrench the paintings away from realism into perceptual dreams...