Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300148895 ISBN 13: 9780300148893

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009

Synopsis

Working in his villa in the south of France, Pierre Bonnard (1867 1947) suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand usually everyday domestic scenes Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist’s daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language.

 

The 75 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all made between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism.

About this title

About the Author:

Dita Amory is Associate Curator, Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Review:

“. . . this handsome volume includes seventy-five carefully selected works from galleries and private collections from around the world . . .  These works are fresh, engaging and superbly presented in a book that will warm the heart of each and every art lover.” — Good Book Guide
(Good Book Guide 2009-05-01)

About this edition

• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0300148895
• ISBN 13: 9780300148893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208
• Editor: Amory Dita