Bonnard, Pierre (1867 - 1947 )
A French painter and printmaker, Pierre Bonnard was a founding member of Les Nabis, a Post-Impressionist, avant-garde group of painters. He is known for his atmospheric scenes and intimate domestic scenes, often featuring his wife Marthe de Meligny. Born in a suburb of Paris to an official of the French Ministry of War, Bonnard studied law and worked as a barrister before pursuing art. He met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1891 and began exhibiting annually with the Société des Artistes Indépendants, holding his first solo show in 1896. He became active with the symbol-driven group of artists, Les Nabis in his twenties, working with artists such as Vuillard and Denis. He moved from Paris to the South of France in 1910, continuing to produce work. The Art Institute of Chicago held a major exhibition of Bonnard and Vuillard in 1938. Bonnard died a week after completing his final painting in 1947. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Pierre Bonnard’s work the following year. Ronin Gallery offers a collection of Pierre Bonnard's paintings and prints.
Japonisme | Impressionist and Post-impressionist Prints
Arriving in Europe as early as the 1830s, Japanese woodblock prints reverberated throughout the West. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle set a fire in the hearts of European art collectors. By the 1870s, ukiyo-e prints reached the height of fashion, inciting a mania amongst art enthusiasts and inspiring the brightest minds in Western art. From Monet to Degas, Van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec, Western artists were forever changed by the compositional daring and unfaltering beauty of ukiyo-e. Such artistic fervor for all things Japanese gave rise to Japonisme, an artistic movement that provided a fresh visual language for a changing world.
