Drawing for Color: Bonnard's Late Paintings Guest Lecture by Dita Amory Met Curator of Lehman Coll

                                                              Dita Amory at the Legion of Honor


Notes from her lecture:   The pencil acts as the artist’s eye. 

He outlined the entire picture in charcoal.  No, he did not prime the surface(Q/A) .  He painted from photographs.  He painted on a free hanging canvas which he did not stretch until finished; that way he could add more length or width to it.  He often painted from photographs.

He had many sketch books (now in Bibliotheque National, Paris) in which he noted color, light, conditions, an in impression in order to capture perceptual data for later paintings. “Sensation” lead to “color tones” through the process of seduction. He sketched with a small stubby pencil.   Brushworks in zones of color.   Activated brush.  Make strong colors by proximity of white and black.  Find colors which represent changing moods.  Real space vs. refracted space.  (remember my poetry collection) .

 For Bonnard, a painting was “feeling made visible”.  “Drawing is feeling, color is judgment”.     For Bonnard, it was an “all everywhere”.  Dita Amory shows us how he used one door and one window and a mirror in several paintings, in order to make audience, subject and painter, all of a piece.   The paintings have a spatial impenetrability peripheral conundrums.  Shared field of vision

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The Legion of Honor presents a special guest lecture on the exhibition, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia, by Dita Amory.This lecture focusses on  the artist's painting process, from first thoughts on paper to dazzling, light-inflected canvases, with  transitions from drawings and photographs to paintings.  

Dita Amory is Acting Associate Curator-in-Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A curator in the department for twenty years, she has organized numerous Lehman Collection exhibitions.  Amory organized the exhibitions Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors (2009) and Madame Cézanne (2014–2015), editing and co-authoring the accompanying publications. In 2011, she co-authored the catalogue for Bonnard en Normandie, an exhibition organized by the Musée des Impressionismes, Giverny. 

She remarks that she saw this current exhibition at the Legion, in Paris.  One of the lovely qualities of the exhibition are all the paintings from the Musee' D'Orsay. 

Born just outside of Paris in 1867, Pierre Bonnard was the son of a high-ranking bureaucrat in the French War Ministry. In 1887 he enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he became a follower of Paul Gauguin who inspired  Les Nabis (after the Hebrew words navi or nabi, meaning prophet), with whom Bonnard joined. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Nabis had disbanded, and for the remainder of his career, Bonnard resisted affiliation with any particular school. Instead, he alternated between the themes and techniques of the Impressionists and the abstract visual modes of modernism.

  

Bonnard worked in many genres and techniques, including painting, drawing and photography. From the domestic and urban scenes of his early Nabi period to the great elegies of the twentieth century, Bonnard’s output is grounded in a modernity that was transformed by his knowledge of works from other cultures, including Japanese woodblock prints and Mediterranean mosaics."

Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia , the first major international presentation of Pierre Bonnard’s work  mounted on the West Coast in half a century, features more than 70 works that span the artist’s complete career, from his early Nabi masterpieces, through his experimental photography, to the late interior scenes for which he is best known, like a fellow painter and friend, Vuillard.  .

The exhibition celebrates Bonnard (French, 1867–1947) as one of the defining figures of modernism in the transitional period between Impressionism and abstraction.  He had three homes, one in Normandy, not far from Giverny and Monet, whom he visited. 

Among the many significant paintings on view will be Man and Woman (1900, Musée d’Orsay), in which the artist has depicted his lifelong companion and one of his constant subjects, Marthe de Méligny. Also featured is a masterpiece  The Work Table (1926–1937, National Gallery of Art.

  I was also very happy to see an old friend in the painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which a Maillot is featured, and could not resist telling a fellow viewer that in Philadelphia, that very sculpture is exhibited by the painting, which will return there, on May 15.  One of Maillot's models for his sculptures is the subject of a painting in the galleries.  

The house he purchased on the coast of Normandy, where he enjoyed taking out the boat, 

and visits to Giverny