WHITNEY BEDFORD | ARTSY - 11 Contemporary Artists Channeling Pierre Bonnard’s Post-Impressionist Vision - News

Veduta (Bonnard Summer), 2021, Ink and oil on linen on hybrid panel, 79 1/2 x 100 inches, 201.9 x 254 cm

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.

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.

— Cath Pound