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Selected Works

Porte-fenêtre ouverte, Vernon [Open French Door, Vernon] c. 1921 Oil on canvas 45 1/8 x 44 1/8 inches (114.6 x 112.1 cm) Private Collection

Porte-fenêtre ouverte, Vernon [Open French Door, Vernon]

c. 1921

Oil on canvas

45 1/8 x 44 1/8 inches (114.6 x 112.1 cm)

Private Collection

Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard

La table devant la fenêtre [Table in Front of the Window]

1934

Oil on canvas

40 x 28 1/2 inches (101.6 x 72.4 cm)

Private Collection

La côte d'azur [The Riviera]

La côte d'azur [The Riviera]

c. 1923

Oil on canvas

31 1/8 x 30 3/8 inches (79.1 x 77.2 cm)

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Acquired 1928

Coupe de fruits [Still Life with a Bowl of Fruit]

Coupe de fruits [Still Life with a Bowl of Fruit]

1933

Oil on canvas

22 13/16 x 20 7/8 inches (57.9 x 53 cm)

Philadelphia Museum of Art; Bequest of Lisa Norris Elkins, 1950 

Le corsage raye

Pierre Bonnard

Le corsage rayé [Striped Blouse]

c. 1922

Oil on canvas

25 1/4 by 17 3/4 inches (64 x 45.1 cm)

Private Collection

Nu [Nude (The Yellow Screen)]

Nu [Nude (The Yellow Screen)]

1920

Oil on canvas

53 1/8 x 27 1/2 inches (134.9 x 69.9 cm)

Private Collection

La porte-fenêtre (Matinée au Cannet) [The French Door (Morning at Le Cannet)] 1932 Oil on canvas 34 7/8 x 44 3/4 inches (88.6 x 113.7 cm) Private Collection

La porte-fenêtre (Matinée au Cannet) [The French Door (Morning at Le Cannet)]

1932

Oil on canvas

34 7/8 x 44 3/4 inches (88.6 x 113.7 cm)

Private Collection

Installations

Bonnard Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Woman at Her Dressing Table (The Bathrobe), c. 1923, Private Collection; Nude (The Yellow Screen), 1920, Private Collection; Large Nude in the Bath, 1924, Private Collection; Golden Hair, 1924, Private Collection; Dining Room on the Garden, 1934-35, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift; The Dining Room, Fruit and Basset Hounds, 1920, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Golden Hair, 1924, Private Collection; Dining Room on the Garden, 1934-35, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift; The Dining Room, Fruit and Basset Hounds, 1920, Private Collection

Installation view

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: The Dining Room, Fruit and Basset Hounds, 1920, Private Collection; The Checkered Tablecloth, 1939, The Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Mary and Leigh Block, 1998.141.4

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: The Checkered Tablecloth, 1939, The Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Mary and Leigh Block, 1998.141.4; Young Women in the Garden (Renée Monchaty and Marthe Bonnard) or The Striped Tablecloth, c. 1921-23, reworked in 1945-46, Private Collection; Basket of Fruit, c. 1946, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 - May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Open French Door, Vernon, c. 1920, Private Collection; Woman at Her Dressing Table (The Bathrobe), c. 1923, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Woman at Her Dressing Table (The Bathrobe), c. 1923, Private Collection; Nude (The Yellow Screen), 1920, Private Collection; Large Nude in the Bath, 1924, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Woman at Her Dressing Table (The Bathrobe), c. 1923, Private Collection; Golden Hair, 1924, Private Collection; Dining Room on the Garden, 1934-35, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift

Installation Photo

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Dining Room on the Garden, 1934-35, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift; After Lunch, 1920, Mr. and Mrs. Kamran Hakim

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: The French Door (Morning at Le Cannet), 1932, Private Collection; Still Life, Fruits, c. 1942, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Still Life, Fruits, c. 1942, Private Collection; Open French Door, Vernon, c. 1921, Private Collection

Installation View

Installation view of Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York from April 12 – May 26, 2023.

Left to Right: Table in Front of the Window, 1934, Private Collection; The Accounts of the Day, 1924, Private Collection

Video

A curatorial walkthrough of the exhibition with the art historian Sarah Whitfield

Press Release

Gallery Hours: Open Mondays - Fridays, 10am to 5:30pm, Saturdays 10am to 6pm

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, a loan exhibition from museums and private collections, featuring over twenty paintings by the modernist French artist Pierre Bonnard. The exhibition will present works created in the last three decades of Bonnard’s career, featuring the artist’s visionary use of color and composition across a range of subjects, including still lifes, nudes, interior scenes, and landscapes. The show is on view April 12 to May 26, 2023 at Acquavella’s New York location.

Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing reasserts the artist’s influence as a pioneering modernist painter whose style transcended the conventional narrative of modern art and who was often overlooked and described as a late impressionist painter. The exhibition highlights his innovative use of incandescent color, open-ended forms, and unconventional compositions. Across works from different moments in time and varied subjects, the exhibition explores how Bonnard translated the experience of optical perception with several tactics, such as shifting spaces, camouflaged and dissolving figures moving in and out of focus, and glimpsed forms hidden at the periphery.

After his early years as a member in the Nabi group, Bonnard pursued his own path as a painter, and his unique techniques and remarkable range of innovations continue to provide inspiration to many artists working today. As stated by art historian and critic Barry Schwabsky in a catalogue essay on the exhibition, it is “Bonnard’s unwillingness to fix himself or his viewers in place that attracts so many artists to his way of working.” Beginning with Bonnard’s influence on color field painters such as Mark Rothko through the lyrical abstractionists of the following generation, Bonnard’s diverse influence extends to a broad and unexpected range of artists working today, including Alex Katz, John Armleder, Lois Dodd, Miquel BarceloĢ, Howard Hodgkin, Peter Doig, Andrew Cranston, Hayley Barker, Whitney Bedford, and Allison Katz.

Bonnard’s bold experiments as a colorist, weaving together intense, vivid tones and using contrasting, complementary colors, are immediately evident in his paintings. His singular pursuit of capturing the experience of optical perception, and the role of memory and experience in observation, are perhaps more slowly revealed through his compositional innovations.

By emptying the interiors of his compositions, what Bonnard termed a “void in the middle,” the viewer is forced to slowly pay attention to perceive the images hidden at the margins of his canvases. These out of focus, slowly revealed forms capture the wavering uncertainty of peripheral vision. Bonnard’s paintings are unfixed, mutable, and in flux; the viewpoints in his compositions are shifting and his open-ended, dissolving, forms lack internal boundaries. His seemingly unfinished, ambiguous images lack resolution, requiring the participation of the viewer to bring them to fruition. This slowly suspended process of reconstructing images through memory and the passage of time achieves what Bonnard spoke of as a “halting of time.”

The exhibition includes several institutional loans from museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, hardcover catalogue with essays by noted art historians and critics Barry Schwabsky and Sarah Whitfield, and distributed by Rizzoli.

Second half of text

Brassäi, Pierre Bonnard in his studio, 1946
Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Adam Rzepka

All works of art by Pierre Bonnard © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris