ART & ARTISTS

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Pierre Bonnard - part 2

c1889 Self-portrait

This is part two of a four-part post on the works of French artist Pierre Bonnard. For earlier works and biographical notes see part one below. Parts three and four will feature lithographs and the commercial works by Bonnard respectively.

c1921-3 Young Woman in the Garden

c1922-30 Standing Nude

1923 In front of the Window at Le Grand-Lemps

1923 Nude Bending Down

1924 Before Dinner

c1924 Nude, Yellow Background

1925 Nude in the Bath

1925 The Bath

1925 The Table

1925 The Window

1930 Bouquet

1930 The Provençal Jug

c1930 The Seine at Vernonnet

1932 La Toilette

1934-5 Dining Room on the Garden

1934-5 Table in front of the Window

c1936-8 The Yellow Boat

1939 Horse-hair Glove

1939 The Chequered Tablecloth

1939 The Terrace at Vernonnet

1940 Basket of Fruit, Oranges and Persimmons

1940 Nude Crouching in the Bath

1940 The Dessert

1940 The Full-length Mirror

1946 Female Nude in Bathtub

Monday, 25 July 2011

Pierre Bonnard - part 1

This is the first of a four-part post on the French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947). The feature Bonnard’s paintings, lithographs, and lesser known commercial art.

Bonnard was born in 1867 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France. He began studying law in Paris in 1887. In the same year he also attended the Académie Julian, and in 1888 entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard, who became his lifelong friends. Bonnard gave up law to become an artist, and, after brief military service, he joined the group of young painters called the Nabis (the prophets) in 1889, which was organized by Paul Sérusier and included Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Roussel, Vuillard, and others. The Nabis, influenced by Paul Gauguin and Japanese prints, experimented with arbitrary colour, expressive line, a wide range of mediums, and flat, patterned surfaces.

In 1890 Bonnard shared a studio with Vuillard and Denis, and he began to make colour lithographs. In the following year, 1891, he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and had his first show at the Salon des Indépendants and in the Nabis’s earliest exhibitions at Le Barc de Boutteville. He exhibited with the Nabis until they disbanded in 1900. Bonnard worked in a variety of mediums – he frequently made posters and illustrations for La Revue blanche, and in 1895 he designed a stained-glass window for Louis Comfort Tiffany. His first solo show, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896, included paintings, posters, and lithographs. In 1897 Ambroise Vollard published the first of many albums of Bonnard’s lithographs and illustrated books.

In 1903 Bonnard participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in the Vienna Secession, and from 1906 he was represented by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. He travelled abroad extensively and worked at various locations in Normandy, the Seine valley, and the south of France (he bought a villa in Le Cannet near Cannes in 1925), as well as in Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major exhibition of the work of Bonnard and Vuillard in 1933, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Bonnard retrospectives in 1946 and 1964. Bonnard died on January 23, 1947, in Le Cannet, France.

1891 Woman with Dog

1894 Woman Washing her Feet

c1894 Two Dogs in a Deserted Street

c1899 Table Setting under the Lamp

1907 In the Bathroom

1907 Woman Bending Over

1908 In the Mirror

1908 Table in the Garden

c1908-12 Hambourg, Picnic

c1909 Woman in front of a mirror

1910 Girl with Parrot

1912 La Place Clichy

1912 Saint-Tropez, Pier

1912 Summer in Normandy

1912 Summer, Dance

1912 Woman with Cat

c1912-14 Lane at Vernonnet

1914 La Toilette

1915 Coffee

c1916-20 Earthly Paradise

1919 Nude in Front of the Mantlepiece

1919 The Bowl of Milk

c1919 Bathing Woman, Seen from the Back

1920 Balcony at Vernonnet

1920 Interior with a Woman in a Wicker Chair

1921 The Open Window

In part 2: more paintings from 1921 and 1946.

Saturday, 23 July 2011

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland (1924 –2010) was an important exponent of colour field painting. He was born in Asheville, North Carolina. A veteran of World War II Noland took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study art at Black Mountain College in his home state of North Carolina where he studied under Ilya Bolotowsky, a professor who introduced him to Neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian.
Noland also studied Bauhaus theory and colour under Josef Albers, and he became interested in Paul Klee.

In 1948 – 1949 Noland worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and had his first exhibition of paintings there. In the early 1950s he met Morris Louis in Washington DC. He became friends with Louis, and after being introduced by Clement Greenberg to Helen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York in 1953 he and Louis adopted her “soak-stain” technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.

In 1949 he had his first solo exhibition: Kenneth Noland, at the Galerie Creuze, in Paris. In 1957 he had the first solo exhibition of his paintings in New York at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
Most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles or targets, chevrons, stripes, and shaped canvases. His preoccupation with the relationship of the image to the containing edge of the picture led him to a series of studies of concentric rings like the one reproduced here called Beginning from 1958 using unlikely colour combinations.

1958 Beginning

In 1964 he was included in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction which travelled the country and helped to firmly establish Colour Field painting as an important new movement in the contemporary art of the 1960s.

Noland pioneered the shaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons. In these paintings, the edges of the canvas become as structurally important as the center. During the 1970s and 1980s his shaped canvases were highly irregular and asymmetrical.

1975 Burnt Beige

In 1964 Noland occupied half the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1965 his work was exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum in New York. He had the final solo exhibition of his lifetime Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981-82 in 2009 at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery in New York. Noland died in 2010.