Pierre Bonnard, Pintor Francés 1867-1947

He began law studies in Paris in 1887. That same year, Bonnard also attended the Académie Julian and in 1888 entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard, who became his lifelong friends. Thus Bonnard gave up law to become an artist, and, after brief military service, in 1889 he joined the group of young painters called the Nabis, which was organized by Paul Sérusier and included Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Roussel, Vuillard, and others. The Nabis, influenced by Paul Gauguin and Japanese prints, experimented with arbitrary color, expressive line, and flat, patterned surfaces.

In 1890, Bonnard shared a studio with Vuillard and Denis, and he began to make color lithographs. The following year, he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Also in 1891, he showed for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants and in the Nabis’s earliest exhibitions at Le Barc de Boutteville. Bonnard exhibited with the Nabis until they disbanded in 1900. He worked in a variety of mediums; for example, he frequently made posters and illustrations for La Revue blanche, and in 1895 he designed a stained-glass window for Louis Comfort Tiffany. His first solo show, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896, included paintings, posters, and lithographs. In 1897, Ambroise Vollard published the first of many albums of Bonnard’s lithographs and illustrated books.

In 1903, Bonnard participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in the Vienna Secession, and from 1906 he was represented by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. He traveled abroad extensively and worked at various locations in Normandy, the Seine valley, and the south of France (he bought a villa in Le Cannet near Cannes in 1925), as well as in Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major exhibition of the work of Bonnard and Vuillard in 1933, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Bonnard retrospectives in 1946 and 1964. Bonnard died January 23, 1947, in Le Cannet, France.

After failing his civil service examination and a six-month military service, which followed, Bonnard rented his first studio with his father's consent. Bonnard exhibited paintings at the Salon des Indépendants from 1891. In the autumn of the same year he took part in the first exhibition of the Nabis in the Gallery of Le Barc de Boutteville. He worked much in all directions; apart from paintings, Bonnard designed furniture and textile patterns, painted screens and stage sets and made puppets for puppet shows, illustrated books. His friends nicknamed him ‘a highly Nipponized Nabi’, because his individual style at that time developed under a strong influence of Japanese prints.

In 1893, he met 16-year-old Marthe de Méligny, of whose real name of Maria Boursin Bonnard was not aware of until they got married 32 years later. From their meeting a large part of his art revolved around her. His paintings of the late 1890s are very personal and intimate, e.g. Indolence (1899), Man and Woman (1900).

From 1900, the artist started spending more and more time out of Paris, in the countryside between Paris and Normandy. His numerous landscapes of the period are influenced both by the Impressionists and Gauguin. From 1906, Bonnard began to have annual one-man exhibitions, the Bernheim-Jeune art-dealing firm signed an exclusive contract for the exhibition of his works. While his compositions and brushwork remained 'traditionally Impressionistic', close to Degas', he gradually developed his own style, enriching the Impressionist color palette.

The newest artistic developments in Paris did not interest Bonnard. Fauve painting, Cubism, and other 'isms' had no influence on him. The best known of his works of the period are panels commissioned by Misia Godebska in Paris (1910) and the triptych The Mediterranean done for the Moscow residence of Ivan Morozov in 1911.

During the years before the First World War he traveled much in Europe and North Africa, (Spain, Belgium, Holland, England, Italy, Germany, Algeria and Tunisia) but it's difficult to find any impact of these travels in his art. During the war he exhibited little. And again, apart from several war-themed sketches, there is no trace of this colossal conflict in his works. It seems he painted from his happy childhood, his art is personal and intimate and the 20th century is absent. The tranquility of his painted world is not disturbed by the events of real life.

In 1918 he was made the honorary president of a society of young French painters.

In 1926 Bonnard bought a house named 'Le Bosquet' at Le Cannet on the Côte d'Azur. The house remained his main place of residence and work until his death. The same year, 1926 year, he visited the USA.

His works of the 1920s and 1930s were called "meditative masterpieces" by some critics.

In 1937 he was honored with the responsibility of decorating the French pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. According to his own opinion he failed to create something worthy on the large surface.

In his old age, Bonnard returned to the youthful exuberance of dazzling light and color, producing compositions of exquisite taste. During the Second World War he lived in Le Bosquet, and continued living there as a recluse after his wife’s death in 1942. In 1945, he paid his last visit to Paris. On January 23, 1947 Bonnard died.