Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision (Hardcover)
Description
An unparalleled reassessment of Pierre Bonnard, exploring his paintings, drawings, photography, and prints
As one of the founders of the post-Impressionist group the Nabis, French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) is frequently seen as a transitional figure between the Impressionists and modernists. This beautifully illustrated book offers a fresh interpretation, revealing the artist’s central concern with expanding representation beyond the limits of natural vision. The result is a new understanding not only of Bonnard but of modernism itself.
Exploring how Bonnard’s dazzling domestic scenes and landscapes reimagine perception, embodiment, and the passage of time, Lucy Whelan characterizes him as a painter of unusual insight in his consideration of the relationship between vision and representation. The book covers Bonnard’s paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints, with special focus on his later works from the 1920s to his death in 1947, and draws on an in-depth study of the artist’s diaries, interviews, and other written sources. A groundbreaking reassessment, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision presents an artist engaged in avant-garde forms of experimentation who complicated vision in innovative ways.
About the Author
Lucy Whelan is Graham Robertson Research Fellow at Downing College, University of Cambridge.
Praise For…
“A highly original account of the artist’s work, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision is far-reaching in its import and consequence for the understanding and reconceptualization of European modernist painting of the early twentieth century.”—Carol Armstrong, author of Cézanne’s Gravity
“Using close visual analysis and a careful reading of the artist’s writings, Lucy Whelan offers a welcome new account of Pierre Bonnard’s art. His late paintings in particular emerge from this book in a new light: complex, sophisticated, deeply human.”—Marnin Young, author of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time