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Lot Essay
In 1912, Bonnard purchased a modest, two-story residence at Vernonnet, a picturesque hamlet in the valley of the Seine not far from Giverny. Following his move, the artist increasingly turned for his subject matter to the rooms in which he lived, painting intimate still-life and interior compositions. Far from fleeting impressions, these paintings are complex and searching meditations on the people, places, and things that comprised the artist's environment. As he explained, "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world--the picture--which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1998, p. 9). Likewise, Nicholas Watkins writes about Bonnard's work from this period, "Paintings begun in the memory of a visual experience were transformed through color into a rich, immensely varied surface made up of a tapestry of brushstrokes, glazes, scumbles, impasto, highlights, and pentimenti. Objects were not so much painted as felt into shape within the surface over a long period. 'The principal subject is the surface,' Bonnard maintained, 'which has its color, its laws over and above those of objects. It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting'" (Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171).
Deux corbeilles de fruits reveals Bonnard's studied assimilation of a host of artistic influences. The tipped-up tabletop, for instance, is a key compositional device in Cézanne's celebrated still-lifes of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as in the proto-Cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque from 1908-1909. In contrast, the vivid color, painterly brushwork, and decorative patterning of the painting reflect Bonnard's frequent correspondence about aesthetic issues with his close friend, Henri Matisse. In 1912, Bonnard purchased Matisse's brilliantly colored Fauve canvas, La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure, which he kept for the remainder of his life. The two painters also exchanged letters about the importance of color: "I agree with you," Bonnard wrote Matisse in 1935, "that the painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 44).
Another critical source of inspiration for the present painting is Japanese graphic art. Bonnard first encountered East Asian woodblock prints at the dealer Siegfried Bing's sweeping survey of the medium at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The exhibition made an enormous impression on the young artist, who began searching Parisian department stores for examples of Japanese art: "There for the price of just one or two pennies, I found crépons and rice papers in astonishing colors. I covered the walls of my room with them" (quoted in ibid., p. 190). He later identified these prints as a key source for the vivid palette of his own art: "It was through contact with these popular images," he explained, "that I realized that color could express anything, with no need for relief or modeling. It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values" (quoted in ibid., p. 202). The unconventional perspective of the present painting--in particular, its steep viewpoint and unexpected cropping--may also derive from East Asian imagery. Commenting on the influence of Japanese art in Bonnard's work after 1912, Ursula Perucchi-Petri has written, "Bonnard's late paintings blossom into freely executed color compositions that follow no law but their own. The intricately woven tapestry of color with its warp and weft of figures and objects draws proximity and distance together in a vibrant fabric. This lends the space a floating aspect, which is a continuation, albeit in another form, of the floating world inspired by East Asian art in his early works" (ibid., p. 202).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Pichet et fruits sur une table, 1893-1894. Private collection. BARCODE 20627300
Deux corbeilles de fruits reveals Bonnard's studied assimilation of a host of artistic influences. The tipped-up tabletop, for instance, is a key compositional device in Cézanne's celebrated still-lifes of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as in the proto-Cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque from 1908-1909. In contrast, the vivid color, painterly brushwork, and decorative patterning of the painting reflect Bonnard's frequent correspondence about aesthetic issues with his close friend, Henri Matisse. In 1912, Bonnard purchased Matisse's brilliantly colored Fauve canvas, La fenêtre ouverte à Collioure, which he kept for the remainder of his life. The two painters also exchanged letters about the importance of color: "I agree with you," Bonnard wrote Matisse in 1935, "that the painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 44).
Another critical source of inspiration for the present painting is Japanese graphic art. Bonnard first encountered East Asian woodblock prints at the dealer Siegfried Bing's sweeping survey of the medium at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The exhibition made an enormous impression on the young artist, who began searching Parisian department stores for examples of Japanese art: "There for the price of just one or two pennies, I found crépons and rice papers in astonishing colors. I covered the walls of my room with them" (quoted in ibid., p. 190). He later identified these prints as a key source for the vivid palette of his own art: "It was through contact with these popular images," he explained, "that I realized that color could express anything, with no need for relief or modeling. It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values" (quoted in ibid., p. 202). The unconventional perspective of the present painting--in particular, its steep viewpoint and unexpected cropping--may also derive from East Asian imagery. Commenting on the influence of Japanese art in Bonnard's work after 1912, Ursula Perucchi-Petri has written, "Bonnard's late paintings blossom into freely executed color compositions that follow no law but their own. The intricately woven tapestry of color with its warp and weft of figures and objects draws proximity and distance together in a vibrant fabric. This lends the space a floating aspect, which is a continuation, albeit in another form, of the floating world inspired by East Asian art in his early works" (ibid., p. 202).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Pichet et fruits sur une table, 1893-1894. Private collection. BARCODE 20627300