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The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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Pierre Bonnard - amazon.de
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The Terrace at
Vernonnet, 1939
Oil on canvas; H. 58-1/4, W. 76-3/4 in. (148 x 194.9 cm)
Gift of Mrs. Frank Jay Gould, 1968 (68.1)
©1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris |
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Bonnard: [exposition] Fondation Pierre Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, Suisse, 11 juin au 14 novembre 1999 - amazon.fr
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Like his friend and
contemporary Édouard Vuillard, Bonnard frequently painted intimate
domestic interiors. In this work, he emphasized the large dinner table
covered with a white cloth and laid with flatware, plates, and carafes.
It is this tableau of inanimate objects, treated as an independent still
life, rather than the two detached and psychologically remote figures,
that is the primary focus of the composition. The absence of
perspective, the flattening of forms, and the evident fondness for
decorative surface patterns are typical of Bonnard's work.
After first studying law, Pierre Bonnard pursued art at the École des
Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian (1888) in Paris. There, he met fellow
art students Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis with whom he formed the
Nabis (1892–99), a group of young painters under the leadership of Paul
Sérusier who followed Paul Gauguin's ideas about representing things
symbolically in strong patterns and colour. Shortly after 1900 Bonnard
redirected his style of painting to more closely follow the
Impressionist tradition, modified by his innate sense of decoration and
design. He continued to use light to change the substance and colour of
form, but he preferred to paint in his studio rather than in the open
air and structured his compositions with formal pattern. He so
convincingly went beyond the limits of local colour and the laws of
natural perspective that in the "Terrace at Vernonnet" the boldness of
his interpretation is barely noticeable. For example, we read the tree
trunk that defines the foreground as a beautiful violet strip as well as
a tree, and the foliage in the background merges into a tapestry of
colour. Although Bonnard continued to paint the Paris he loved, he
developed a passion for the countryside and the seasons. The daily
intimacies of family life add warmth to his art (he was also referred to
as an "Intimist"), but there is nothing casual in his presentation. He
believed that in landscape the human figure "should be part of the
background against which it is placed," and more than any other of the
older Impressionist painters he deliberately controlled the viewer's
eye. He knew exactly what he wanted us to see, but he didn't want
everything in the picture to be evident at first glance — more
concentrated looking was expected. About 1920 Bonnard originally (and
atypically) painted this composition in grisaille on a slightly smaller
canvas, which he left unfinished but did not destroy. From it he derived
this painting, which he finished some twenty years later. It is probably
Bonnard's last view of the terrace at his house in the Seine valley
between Normandy and the Île de France, not far from Giverny, the home
of his friend Claude Monet. He purchased the property in 1912 and used
it as a subject for his painting until 1939. Elements of his comfortable
bourgeois life are in evidence: fruit, wine, company. The gaze of the
central figure is rather enigmatic, as is the gesture of the woman at
the right. The main figures concentrate on their inner world rather than
on their companions or the tasks in which they are engaged. Bonnard
painted a shaded corner of the irregularly shaped, raised terrace that
surrounded the house. Only a banister indicates the steps that descended
to the sprawling garden below. In the painting the terrace serves as a
stage, with the garden rising like a curtain beyond. Toward the end of
his life Bonnard approached abstraction, increasingly subordinating the
subject in order to obtain the desired effects of colour and light.
Copyright © 2000–2004 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All rights
reserved. |
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