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There
is always color, it has yet to become light
- Pierre Bonnard
Matisse and Gauguin were both masters of color, but it is Bonnard
who took it to delirious heights with his own distinctive palette,
and as the best writers and painters have sometimes done, worked
and re-worked the same narrow territory in an attempt to reach
perfection: domestic scenes, his wife Marthe, pets, interiors,
still lifes.
Pierre
Bonnard, born in 1867, was a member the Nabis (nabi is
prophet in Hebrew) a group of painters, who were influenced by
Gauguin's use of wild color. They claimed that color in
painting should be independent of objective reality, that a
painting was an arrangement of colors and shapes on a plane
surface. It was, in fact, a group that believed in the
extraordinary power of color.
This
exhibition focuses on the iridescent late interiors and still
lifes of Bonnard from the years when he lived in the village of Le
Cannet, on the Mediterranean. He worked from his pink stucco
house, and from his surroundings - the rooms of his house, the
objects within - created paintings that are really about alchemy,
the transformation of the quotidian into luminous magic.
The
early influence of Japanese prints on Bonnard's painting, a
defining influence on his oeuvre, remains evident in these later
paintings. In Japanese prints, color is often 'flat' and
there are multiple perspectives and ambiguous depth. Bonnard
used color not in some mysterious, magical way - the cacophony of
color is always calculated. Warm colors and cool colors are
used to flatten, to create a Japanese-like sense of perspective,
the flat floating world that is removed from Renaissance and
Western ideas of depth and perspective. A certain blue-violet,
often accompanied by orange and green became iconic.
Blotches and scumbling, broken-color technique all define his
prophetic and sensual use of color. Atmosphere and mood are
important, art here is pure aesthetic reaction, sensory and
transformative. In
The White Interior (above) it is only after some
time that the viewer notices that there is a woman in the
painting, and that she is leaning down towards a cat. Intimism
was after all first used to describe the work of Bonnard, and his
contemporary Vuillard, and intimism in essence was all about the
attempt to recreate the quiet meditative isolation of the
interior, a moment in time. Natural color is distorted, mood
and light are everything.
Read:
Pierre
Bonnard: The Late Interiors, The Metropolitan Museum of New
York, through April 19.
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