Pierre Bonnard
15 quotes
Biography
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists.
"Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly."
"Art will never be able to exist without nature."
"A painting that is well composed is half finished."
"I work in the mornings and in the afternoons I go to the Latin Quarter. It is a long way from the Batignolles district to the Pantheon: Fortunately there is the Metro. It amuses me to see the people squashed together, and among them are some pretty faces which I draw in the evenings, from memory, in my sketchbook."
"My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct."
"I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream."
"It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose."
"Almost invariably he recognizes the precise point where his voluptuousness may be getting out of hand, where he needs to introduce an ironic note. Bonnard's wit has everything to do with the eccentric nature of his compositions. He finds it funny to sneak a figure into a corner, or have a cat staring out at the viewer. His metaphoric caprices have a comic edge, as when he turns a figure into a pattern in the wallpaper. And when he imagines a basket of fruit as a heap of emeralds and rubies and diamonds, he does so with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat."
"Bonnard was the humorist among us; his nonchalant gaiety, his wit was evident in his pictures [many of daily-life in the Paris' streets], in which a kind of satiric quality was always embodied n the decorative spirit.. .Bonnard did not resemble Denis or Vuillard in any way, yet all three approached life with a noble determination which was a god-send to me."
"[Bonnard] catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallises the most transient expressions."
"It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard; there's also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."
"In Bonnard's work, Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline."
"Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it."
"The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing."
"One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture."