I love the intimate, light filled domestic paintings of Pierre Bonnard. The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC owns several works by Bonnard and is hosting an exhibition next month that has many of us fans excited.

Bonnard was known for spending sometimes years on a painting, often walking by his stretched canvases which he mounted on his home studio walls and adding a dab here or there. Credible stories attest to Bonnard being the guest in a patron’s home and insisting that he needed to take the painting back and make some changes. As someone who can work deligently on a painting and then know that I need to let it alone, often position around my studio home and see it from new perspectives to figure out what it needs to be more resolved; I sometimes indulge myself in the fun of thinking that I am “channeling my inner Bonnard”.

Bonnard was born in 1867 and died in 1947. During his lifetime the changes in paint alone were HUGE. No longer were painters limited to a palette based on grinding up rocks and dirt but there was explosion of color from mineral pigments that were being ground and manufactured into tubes that one could easlily purchase and transport. Bonnard loved his cadmiums. He loved color. His paintings are a celebration, almost a magical mystery tour of color.

Bonnard also lived through two world wars. Historical consensus seems to confirm that WW1 was a particularly absurd war and claimed the lives of some 40 million people. Mustard gas, rats in trenches, a world wide flu pandemic and lots of hastily made and the legacy of some very bad treaties and the drawing of borders and invention of countries by people in power who had limited knowledge of those regions is still playing out, often violently. Then a brief respite before before a world wide depression and WW2. When I look at Bonnard’s light filled domestic moments captured with radiant color, I can’t help but think that Bonnard high tailed it from Paris to Cannes with the mindset that he could not change the coming added trauma but that he could focus on beauty. He could insulate himself on his hillside with his happy obsession.

As a self taught naive painter I thought it might be good instruction to attempt a copy of a one of his many paintings that I love. I chose “The Table” which is dated 1925 and is in the collection of The Tate in London. I could spend years doing one copy after another but this is a study! One of the most interesting things I observed while looking at this painting is Bonnard’s structure of connection. While cast shadows often link objects Bonnard often created painted pathways between pieces. The interconnectedness of things and for Bonnard that interconnctedness was beauty.

The Phillips Collection- Bonnard’s Worlds-March 2-June 2, 2024

18 February 2024