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Lot Essay
The early twenties, a decade characterised by a conscious need in France for celebration after the Great War, represents a period of immense change in Bonnard's life and work. Claude Roger-Marx claimed in 1924 that, after the collpase of cubism, the time of injustice was over and Bonnard was rediscovered. "His charms had recovered their power" (C. Roger-Marx, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, 1924, p. 3). Bonnard's reputation spread abroad for the first time and dealers began to compete for his work. In April 1924, the Galerie Druet held a major retrospective of his work and Bernheim-Jeune gave him a one-man show in the Summer.
When Bonnard painted Portrait d'une jeune fille he was an artist on the threshold of the very pinnacle of his mature powers. At the same time, however, he was grieving at the death of his sister and brother-in-law and suffering the increasing strain of having to look after the declining Marthe. "His solution to the problem of matching vision with nature was to discover in nature the conditions that matched his vision. While endowing a subject with all the immediacy, warmth and sensuous richness of the thoroughly familiar, remembered in an atmosphere of affection, he disrupted conventional ways of looking at things and involved the spectator in painting as an expressive language" (N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 168).
Bonnard portrays this young girl with extraordinary vibrancy, but also subverts this liveliness with a very static pose set against a lucid, but flat background, cutting off the hands and diminishing in her any form of expression. "I believe that when you are young, it is the object, the outside world that inspires you: you are totally absorbed. Later, it is the internal, the need to express an emotion that drives the painter to choose such and such a starting point, such and such a form" (Bonnard to Pierre Courthion, quoted in M. Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, London, 1988, p. 166).
When Bonnard painted Portrait d'une jeune fille he was an artist on the threshold of the very pinnacle of his mature powers. At the same time, however, he was grieving at the death of his sister and brother-in-law and suffering the increasing strain of having to look after the declining Marthe. "His solution to the problem of matching vision with nature was to discover in nature the conditions that matched his vision. While endowing a subject with all the immediacy, warmth and sensuous richness of the thoroughly familiar, remembered in an atmosphere of affection, he disrupted conventional ways of looking at things and involved the spectator in painting as an expressive language" (N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 168).
Bonnard portrays this young girl with extraordinary vibrancy, but also subverts this liveliness with a very static pose set against a lucid, but flat background, cutting off the hands and diminishing in her any form of expression. "I believe that when you are young, it is the object, the outside world that inspires you: you are totally absorbed. Later, it is the internal, the need to express an emotion that drives the painter to choose such and such a starting point, such and such a form" (Bonnard to Pierre Courthion, quoted in M. Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, London, 1988, p. 166).