C’est Bonnard!

HIS COLORS ARE luscious. A bowl of fruit becomes less an image than a smell and a taste. His subjects-provincial rooms, spring landscapes, his bathing wife-are deceptively simple. The sheer quiet of his paintings simmers with noisy elements of the modern. In fact, it is the modernity of Pierre Bonnard’s work that brings 61 of his paintings to the Dallas Museum of Art this month in the first-ever international exhibition that focuses exclusively on the paintings from 1900 to 1947-the second half of the artist’s life.

Organized jointly by the DMA, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the show finishes its tour of these three museums in Dallas September 16 through November 11. It highlights the mature works of a man who was never quite at peace with the naturalistic constraints of Impressionism, although his earlier work particularly is, of a sort, Impressionistic.

Born outside of Paris in 1867, Bonnard spent much of his life living in the country and painting country scenes. For many years, his work was considered more charming and pleasant than provocative. Because of this, he is often mistakenly thought of as distinctly non-Parisian, although the opposite is true.

He received a classical education in Paris and was aprecocious lawyer at 21. But he was an artist then, too, partof the Nabi group that included such avant-garde paintersof the day as Serusier and Vuillard, as well as the radicaltheater director Lugné-Poe. Bonnard was always a man forthe new, for the as-yet-untried, and his paintings reflect aconcern not with reality but with the grandeur and nobility that small realities attain through color and perspective.He considered color to be the strongest mode of thought,understanding and communication. Almost always, Bonnard worked from sketches and memory. He once said “Ileave it [the subject] and come back to it later. I never letmyself become absorbed in the reality.”