Word: bonnards
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...exhibition is fascinating, but a blockbuster it is not. The pictorial tradition it examines -- broadly, the image of landscape as Arcadia, from Giorgione down the centuries to Bonnard, Matisse and their later modern heirs -- contains some of the most poignant, influential and exquisitely developed paintings in the history of art. Few of them, in these days of terminally fragile objects and impossible insurance costs, could or should be allowed to travel. An exhibition that dealt with this theme at full stretch would have to include Giorgione's Tempest and his (or Titian's) Concert Champetre, Botticelli's Primavera, Titian...
...stomach like the knob of Mont Ste.-Victoire. And then, inseparable from Hockney's skill and lack of pretension, there is his candor about sexual matters, which is no more titillating today than it was shocking in the early '60s. It is simply there, part of the work, like Bonnard's liking for peaches...
...efforts of painters, this one was it. Paul Cezanne, a Provencal rooted in the limestone and red clay of his native Aix, had made backcountry Provence around Mont Ste.-Victoire one of the sacred loci of the modernist imagination. Among them, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard would do the same for the coast...
...Bonnard's light and Matisse's luxe, run through Greenberg's reduction mill and then filtered by Louis' own obsession with the ethereal, came out in a curiously attenuated form. But it supported -- and after Louis' death was in turn supported by -- the argument that after Pollock painting had only one way to go. No more figures, organic symbolism or utopian geometry; no more gestural surfaces, tonal structure or cubist layering of space. In future, art would hang onto the spread-out, expansive quality of Pollock's work while refreshing it with a new intensity of color, inspired by Matisse...
...Albrecht Durer's view of the Apocalypse as the day when "the sun would go out, and the heavens would be rolled up and put away like a manuscript." He reports that the mosques of Istanbul are "the colour of ripe honeydew melons." He encapsulates a special quality in Bonnard's art by calling it "an art about cultivating one's own garden...