The angle of a doorframe, an open window, a table laid with fruit and teacup, a dog perched on a checkered tablecloth—all these moments of everyday life, heightened with color and shadow, are Bonnard’s drama. He said that he doesn’t paint in front of the subject but sketches the scene, departs, dreams the image and then paints. His hand managed to capture this dreaming on canvas. There’s a liquid viscosity to his images as if at any moment they will slide out of view and vanish, like in a dream.
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A show currently at The Phillips Collection, “Bonnard’s Worlds,” captures the artist’s skill like a living snapshot in sixty works spanning six decades. Rather than displaying canvases chronologically, curator Elsa Smithgall chose a different approach. “Because Bonnard’s inspiration was his daily existence, the concept of the show is his intimate relation with the natural and domestic world and his art,” she told Observer. “His sense of wide expanse in nature’s grandeur all the way to the interiors, like the bathrooms, the most intimate.”
Each room of the exhibition has a theme: landscapes and garden, dining room and parlor, bedroom and bathroom. And it is indeed a fresh way to display Bonnard’s artistry, but it misses the opportunity to view his development as an artist.
In all the work, there is his luxurious color and light in complex compositions. Often the people in his paintings blend into the wall, painted with darkened flesh, giving the sense that everything is of equal value.........