After the very successful retrospective devoted to Paul Gaugin in 1998, the Pierre Gianadda Foundation is showing the work of Pierre Bonnard, an artist who always claimed that he followed in the line which is essential to understanding the art of the 20th century.
Pierre Bonnard has already entered the annals of history but his prolific work is taking on new meaning on the eve of a new millennium for he himself said, at the end of the Second World War, "I do hope that my paintings will not crack for I should like them to reach the young painters of the year 2000 on butterflies' wings".
He was a contemporary of Henri Matisse as well as of Claude Debussy and Marcel Proust and his strength lay in the intensity of the way he untiringly investigated colour, light and space.
The simplest of subjects, daily life and those near and dear to him formed the bulk of a repertoire whose function it seemed to be to protect an apparent calm. However, his work as a whole is shrouded by the force of innovation. Unlike Claude Monet, his neighbour in Vernon, he was constantly and wittingly questioning subjects that seemed already to have been analysed and studied down to the nth degree.
He would always be seeking - and finding - the truth in his everyday scenes, in the luminous body of his beloved wife, Marte, or in those interiors in which time seems to stand still, immaterial, and depicted from unusual but true-to-life angles, in a state of apparent imbalance but always with a perfect rendition of colours.Pierre Bonnard was obviously in direct communion with painting and, as we draw towards the end of this millennium, he remains a reference of modernity for young artists. He once said, "Virtually the entire art of painting is a matter of lightening and darkening tones without changing their colours".
This singular power that he attributed to a still fundamental craft nevertheless made him one of the major painters of his day who, with humility and also great sophistication, questions painting as the dazzling synthesis of an entire life. Ever since his first paintings at the end of the 19th century, his move to the astonishing Nabi [?] period with his friend Edouard Vuillard soon conferred new freedom on Pierre Bonnard. He became totally free of all the movements that marked the early 20th century.
He was aware of, and recognised, the discoveries made by his contemporaries but he was a loner who followed an exceptional path in order to conduct an endless dialogue with the essence of his life - painting.
The Pierre Gianadda Foundation exhibition will disclose the progress of this untypical and modest painter whose al-most insolent determination to indulge in salutary analysis, making him one of the great innovators of our age, com-mands respect.
There will be works from all stages of his life, illustrating this faultless progress, and drawn from some of the greatest collections, especially: the Moscow Pushkin Museum, the Canadian Fine Arts Museum, the London Tate Gallery, the Belgium Royal Fine Arts Museums, Grenoble Museum, the Alibi Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundations in Madrid and the Maeght of Saint-Paul.
Major European and American private collections have also contributed to setting a particular tone for this exhibition which will include some 120 works including paintings, water-colours, drawings, engravings and sculptures. Mr. Jean-Louis Prat, curator of the Bonnard Exhibition, has already organised three exhibitions at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation, all of which were a resounding success - Braque in 1992, Nicolas de Staël in 1995 and Miró in 1997.
The Bonnard Exhibition catalogue, containing numerous texts including an introduction, a biography and a bibliography and notes on all the work on show which are reproduced in colour, is on sale at CHF 45.- (euro 30.-)
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