Pierre Bonnard: Poppies, 1914

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis. He preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, and his paintings are often characterised by a dreamlike quality.

Bonnard spent many years searching for the right expression as a painter. Pablo Picasso famously called Bonnard’s painted palette “a potpourri of indecision.” In fact, that palette was anything but an arbitrary assemblage of hues on canvas. For Bonnard, the act of painting was an investigation of the physical substance of paint, the visual rhymes echoing throughout the canvas, the dialogue of colour notes. These formal considerations set him apart from the conceptual art of his French contemporaries. The tension of brushwork that animates Bonnard’s paintings, especially the late work, is precisely due to carefully considered colour relationships throughout the canvas rectangle. Those relationships probe colour as it translates light, and light as it transforms colour. Colour and its infinite relationships become the metaphor for Bonnard’s experience of his subject.

Bonnard lived into his eightieth year, spending time increasingly at Le Bosquet, his small house in Le Cannet overlooking the Mediterranean. The downstairs dining room and the upstairs sitting room provide the constructs for some of his finestinteriors and still lifes.

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HC-1302: card size 7" x 5" (178mm x 127mm)