11 Contemporary Artists Channeling Pierre Bonnard’s Post-Impressionist Vision
Considered one of the greatest colorists of modern art, Pierre Bonnard reveled in the simple joys of daily life. Whether painting domestic interiors, landscapes, and seascapes, or capturing the delights of his beloved garden in Le Cannet in the south of France, Bonnard transformed the everyday into something sublime. He’s especially known for his use of vivid tones, which he boldly contrasted with complementary colors in fascinating combinations. The painter is still wildly popular, with a major museum exhibition of his work on its way across the U.S. currently: “Bonnard’s Worlds,” co-organized by The Kimbell Art Museum and The Phillips Collection, is on show at the Kimbell in Fort Worth, Texas, through January 28th, then opens at The Phillips in Washington, D.C., on March 2nd.
A member of Les Nabis along with other names such as Édouard Vuillard, Bonnard embraced the group’s abandonment of three-dimensional modeling in favor of flat color areas. In this he was partially influenced by the Japanese prints that would inspire numerous artists of the era. Les Nabis were also insistent upon breaking down the barrier between painting and the applied arts. Bonnard created a number of decorative panels including The Women in the Garden (1891) which he originally imagined being hung together as a screen. The idea that a painting could be a decorative object in and of itself would continue to have a profound effect on his approach to color once he left the group.
For Bonnard, color was an end in itself, a way to experience the world around him. He chose not to paint from life, instead drawing or photographing his subject and making notes on the colors he saw before returning to the studio. While painting he sought to capture the spirit of a moment rather than an exact representation of person or place.
Often playing with perspective, his works resist any attempt to represent reality, as seen in the flat planes of color and pattern in Young Women in the Garden (also known as The Striped Table Cloth) (1921–23).
Today, Bonnard’s unique approach to representation is still inspiring new generations of artists. Below, Artsy highlights 11 artists who have taken inspiration from the French painter’s style.
Polly Shindler
B. 1977, New Haven, Connecticut. Lives and works in New York.
The glorious riot of pattern, color, and texture in Polly Shindler’s eclectic interiors shows an obvious affinity with Bonnard, whose work has long been admired by the New Haven–born artist. It is his “language, and not his subject matter that I look to,” she told Artsy via email.
Of Bonnard’s works, The Yellow Shawl (ca. 1925) is one painting Shindler finds herself returning to repeatedly. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how he created all the action and story in one still image. The fabrics are in motion, the table is covered with activated objects, the figures are dynamic. His use of color—yellow here—is so incredible; he leans heavily on color in a way that dazzles,” Shindler said.
In works such as Teal Curtains with Settee (2017) or Twin Loungers (2019), Shindler herself makes a similarly dazzling use of color. However, unlike many of Bonnard’s interiors, Shindler’s are devoid of human presence. They remain empty, enticing retreats waiting for their occupiers to descend on them.
Mimi Lauter
B. 1982, San Francisco. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mimi Lauter, Bonnard reinterpretation, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
“I’ve always loved how [Bonnard] and many of his contemporaries were blurring the line between the decorative and fine arts,” L.A.-based artist Mimi Lauter told Artsy via email. Lauter’s works blur boundaries, too, hovering somewhere between still life and landscape.
Lauter is also intrigued by the way Bonnard’s style changed between his decorative panels and paintings. “The color is flatter and areas of pattern consume large swaths of the landscape but they still feel like they’re teetering on landscape,” she said of his decorative screens. For Bonnard reinterpretation (2023), Lauter drew inspiration from The Women in the Garden (1891), a series of panels by Bonnard in the Musée d’Orsay, deciding to combine them together and make a “real painting.”
Lauter approached the work “not really having a definition of it, but thinking more about how he thought differently about his layering and type of space,” she said. The result is a dreamlike paean to nature, and was part of Lauter’s show “Gardens of Human Nature” at Mendes Wood DM’s New York space late last year.
Sophie Treppendahl
B. 1991, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Lives and works in New Orleans.
Sophie Treppendahl’s artistic focus on the simple things in life mirrors that of Bonnard. The young American artist also utilizes the same bold color palette and approach to creation as her French forebear.
In a work such as Living Room, Evening (2021), the light source may be a glowing TV screen rather than an oil lamp, but the sense of tranquility is the same. Its sister painting Living Room, Morning (2021), with its red and white gingham tablecloth scattered with magazines and breakfast crockery basking in the early morning sun, reads like a contemporary homage to Bonnard works like The Red Chequered Tablecloth (1910). In both paintings, Treppendahl’s enthusiasm for mixing pattern and texture shows an obvious affinity with the French master.
Like Bonnard, Treppendahl aims to evoke the feeling or memory of a space rather than its tangible reality. Cozy and welcoming, with the hint of enjoyment past or that about to materialize, they are spaces we may well yearn to inhabit.
Marcus Jahmal
B. 1990, Brooklyn. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Self-taught, Brooklyn-born artist Marcus Jahmal draws on sources as diverse as his own autobiography, history, and folklore for his bold magical realist compositions. Although he was not familiar with Bonnard when he first started painting, Jahmal’s interest in color and interior scenes drew him instinctively to the French painter. “Observing his work gave me a sense of reassurance on my own usage of color,” he told Artsy via email.
“What attracts me to the work of Bonnard is the way he liberates color. Along with the rest of the Les Nabis group and Henri Matisse, [he] used color in a non-naturalistic way. They changed the function from naturalistic to a function of expressing emotion,” said Jahmal.
Jahmal’s own striking use of color can be seen in the enigmatic painting Entrance (2022), in which a figure cautiously enters an interior depicted in luscious shades of green, violet, and orange.
Whitney Bedford
B. 1976, Baltimore. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
The L.A.-based artist Whitney Bedford has loved Bonnard since she was a student. For her “Veduta” painting series, in which Bedford subverts the historical tradition of landscape painting to critique the current destruction of the natural world, she found herself circling back to Bonnard for several reasons: His use of color and pattern, and his “appreciation of the immediacy of the moment,” she told Artsy via email. Bedford sees Bonnard’s work, with its dots and dashes, as a precursor to our digital image culture in the way it encodes the environment around him.
Veduta (Bonnard The Large Garden) (2023), in which acid-hued trees hover over a landscape in a style strongly reminiscent of Bonnard, reveals Bedford’s love of the natural environment, tinged with an awareness of its ongoing destruction.
Andrew Cranston
B. 1969, Hawick, Scotland. Lives and works in Glasgow.
Weaving autobiographical elements with a broad range of visual and literary references, Glasgow-based painter Andrew Cranston creates beguiling, sometimes unnerving narratives that evoke the emotional complexity and absurdity of everyday life. Often painted on hardback book covers, his works evolve through the interplay of paint, varnish, and collage, layered and reworked until an image emerges. Frequently dispensing with linear perspective, his paintings achieve a decorative yet somewhat elusive and unsettling quality, which seems a direct reference to Bonnard.
Cranston has acknowledged this influence quite explicitly in interviews, and has spoken about his love of the nervous, hesitant quality that enlivens Bonnard’s work, a result of the French painter’s tendency to revisit and rework so many of his canvases. And despite the vibrant luminosity of so much of Cranston’s work, he also identifies a certain darkness in some of Bonnard’s interiors, which feeds directly into his own paintings, such as A Snake Came to My Coffee Table on a Hot, Hot Night (2023).
Jennifer Bartlett
B. 1941, Long Beach, California. D. 2022, Amagansett, New York.
One of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful female artists of her generation, Jennifer Bartlett, who died in 2022, drew inspiration from a variety of modernist painters, but she had a particular kinship with Bonnard. Both were keen gardeners, and their works each reflect an enduring affinity and creative dialogue with nature.
This is especially evident in her series “In the Garden” (1980–83), comprising some 200 drawings that originated in the winter of 1979–80 when Bartlett was staying in a small villa in Nice, not far from Bonnard’s own home in Le Cannet. Using the villa’s small, overgrown garden as subject matter, she focused on a few motifs—a dense row of cypresses, a swimming pool, a reproduction of the famous statue Manneken Pis—to explore perspective, scale, and changing light. Executed in a range of styles and media, the drawings inspired a further series of monumental paintings that, much like the work of Bonnard, evoke a sense of the joy and intense emotion that nature can inspire.
Freya Douglas-Morris
B. 1980, London. Lives and works in London.
Often populated with lone or paired figures in a state of repose or contemplation, the luminous landscapes of London-based Freya Douglas-Morris resonate with a mysterious, dreamlike quality. Inspired by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet, Vuillard, and especially Bonnard, she draws inspiration from the colors and ever-changing light of her immediate surroundings.
Like Bonnard, Douglas-Morris prefers not to paint from life, allowing the verdant natural spaces she depicts to be transformed and enlivened by memory and imagination, often heightening their emotional impact via an almost hallucinatory color palette.
In her painting Pink Moon (2023), this bold use of color is combined with flat forms and clearly delineated edges that sometimes evoke printed images, which recalls Bonnard’s early work in particular, when he was profoundly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints (he was even known as Le Nabi le trés japonard—“The very Japanese Nabi”).
Shota Nakamura
B. 1987, Yamanashi, Japan. Lives and works in Berlin.
Shota Nakamura’s dreamlike domestic interiors and sun-drenched gardens, populated by enigmatic, motionless figures in states of rest or contemplation, share an obvious affinity with the work of Bonnard, employing the same verdant natural spaces; rich palette of vibrant, often contrasting colors; and avoidance of linear perspective.
While Bonnard’s intimate scenes of everyday life often drew on autobiographical elements, including friends and family members, Nakamura’s works are more heady and philosophical. Summer Table (2023), for example, explores the slowing down of time and those moments in which the everyday gives way to dream and the subconscious.
Having grown up with the rural beauty in Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, not far from Mount Fuji, an affinity for the natural world is part of Nakamura’s DNA. Although he now lives in Berlin, he still takes daily walks through the city’s parks and green spaces in order to achieve the peaceful, meditative frame of mind that he channels into his remarkable paintings.
Hayley Barker
B. 1973, Oregon. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
The work of L.A.-based painter Hayley Barker has drawn numerous comparisons to both Symbolist and Post-Impressionist painters, from Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau to Paul Gauguin. Her work, however, is especially closely related to Bonnard. With subjects incorporating both real and imagined places that seem to be both landscape and dreamscape, her work uses an expressive palette of vivid colors and some decidedly Bonnard-esque touches.
A shared interest in the role of memory and experience in observation is evident in both painters’ desire to capture the sublime sense of mystery that the natural world can engender. The lush foliage and vivid greens, purples, and pinks found in Barker’s works such as Sycamore Trees (2022) and Terrace Path 2 (2023) recall Bonnard’s bold experiments as a colorist. Meanwhile, View from Isa’s Room (2022), depicting a garden viewed from a domestic interior, could be seen as a direct descendent of Bonnard’s Fenêtre ouverte sur la Seine (1911).
John McAllister
B. 1973, Slidell, Louisiana. Lives and works in Florence, Massachusetts.
John McAllister had plenty of time to study his favorite Post-Impressionist painters, including Bonnard, up close when he was working as a night guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Still lifes such as while dreamy sometimes gleaming (2023) have the same flat panes of color as Bonnard’s examples of this genre. However, McAllister’s distinctive palette of reds, mauves, purples, and oranges makes his paintings entirely his own.
Elsewhere, he takes inspiration from the French artist’s uninhibited use of color to conjure otherworldly landscapes. Reveling in pattern and color, works such as glittery eden charmed (2023) show an affinity with Les Nabis and their belief that a painting can be a decorative object in and of itself. His work exalt make much melody (2023), a folding screen (a format favored by Bonnard), comprises four panels painted in luscious shades of pink and mauve, each decorated with a vibrant landscape. One imagines Bonnard would have approved.
Header image credit: Pierre Bonnard, La Symphonie pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony), 1916-1920. © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt © ADAGP, Paris 2015.
