Western artists have freely celebrated the natural human form since the Renaissance, but seldom have they found as much vibrant beauty within it as French painter Pierre Bonnard.
With a career spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bonnard’s work falls between the earlier naturalist Impressionism of, say, Renoir’s bathers, and the avant-garde color work of Gaugin, whose psychologically charged and enigmatic scenes of “exotic” Tahitian life Bonnard greatly admired.
A group of figures by Gaugin (left) and a bather by Renoir (right).
Though he is not as well-known as either of those artists, Bonnard’s hand is unmistakable once you know it. Bonnard’s work charms us without the showy intrigue of the one or the thinly veiled classicism of the other. Despite his love of the brightest colors, Bonnard’s stylized, decorative approach somehow imbues the quiet moments of ordinary life – the stone steps leading into his garden, his wife bathing or cooking, their cat stretching itself after a nap with delightful vitality and importance.
Detail, Bonnard, “Bathing Woman, Seen from Behind,” 1919, oil on canvas
In the closeup above, we can get the flavor of Bonnard’s playful and unusual combinations of color and the thin washes of color he used to build up his vibrant surfaces, which seem to shimmer and almost emit their own light when seen in person. The woman in the painting is Bonnard’s wife-to-be Marthe (Maria Boursin), whom the painter constantly sketched and photographed in preparation for the more than 300 oil paintings he made of her.
Yet, it’s neither Bonnard’s colors nor his subject matter alone, but the way he brings them together, that beguiles not only the eye but the mind. Despite their initial brightness, the paintings are like ornate treasure boxes containing quiet moments of lived experience.
Pierre Bonnard, “Stairs in the Artist’s Garden,” 1942-4, oil on canvas, (23 5/8 × 28 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
A poet’s painter, Bonnard was beloved of mid-century New York poet Frank O’Hara, who, like the French painter, celebrated “everydayness” in deceptively simple forms, such as his justly famous poem, “The Day Lady Died,which describes learning of the death of Billie Holiday during an otherwise routine day in midtown New York in July 1959.
Along the same lines, American artist Fairfield Porter once said, “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful. This partly means that a painting should contain a mystery, but not for mystery’s sake: a mystery that is essential to reality.”
Here’s to the mysteries of art and beauty and life in all its occasional, ordinary glamour.
If you’re interested in learning techniques for painting the figure, check out some of the professional teaching videos by master painters here.
