Pierre Bonnard (Library of Great Painters)

Pierre Bonnard's work has slowly but irresistibly made its way to top ranking in art since Impressionism. His work is in no wise spectacular, and Bonnard himself can hardly be called an innovator. Yet, as the reproductions in this book show, his art offers something rare and precious, for it is painting for the sheer pleasure of painting, free of both the problems of the world and the problems of the artist. Bonnard painted sunlight and air. He painted warmth, comfort, and intimacy. In his profusion of interiors, the table is always laden with fruit; doors and windows are open, and the lush and heady landscapes flood the room with their inviting radiance. The ambiance is one of sensuous delight.

Bonnard's early work shows him a keen and quick ob. server of Paris street life and of uncomplicated bourgeois pleasures. The commercialized amusements and the darker side of life he left to others. He was at this time associated with the Nabis, seeking to simplify painting after Impressionism and to introduce some degree of spirituality. Strongly influenced by Japanese prints, he was called "the very ultra-Japanese Nabi." But what he learned from the Japanese was soon merged with the Impressionist attitude toward color into a new and highly personal kind of painting. His themes became simple--and repetitive: scenes of family life, interiors and terraces, some portraits, still lifes, nudes in or out of the bath.

The author of this book, André Fermigier, a leading French art critic and historian, conducts us from the early, whimsical glimpses of daily life to the artist's dedication to color and glowing luminosity. We see Bonnard's work dis. tilling its own particular qualities from everyday surround-ings, to become a special kind of abstraction in which areas and patches of color assert their own life before allowing the objects to be recognized for themselves. "The presence of the object, of the motif, is very disturbing to the artist when he paints," said Bonnard a few years before his death in 1947.

This book offers a fresh look at Bonnard's work and emphasizes his distinctive use of color. Yet it does not neglect Bonnard the brilliant draftsman, poster designer, and book illustrator. The responsive reader will be able to add yet another name to his list of twentieth-century immortals in art.