Notes on Pierre Bonnard's Landscape in Provence（1932）

• Published in: Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan Kenkyū Kiyō no. 27; p. 4
• Main Author: Yukiko, Yokoyama
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 01.01.2023
• Subjects: 20th century; Bonnard, Pierre; Landscape art; Provence France; France
• ISSN: 0914-7489

Pierre Bonnard's Landscape in Provence, which was acquired by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2020, is one of Bonnard's strangest and most elusive paintings. At the time the work was made, 1932, Bonnard had long been living in Le Cannet, a town in the hills of southeastern France that overlooks the Mediterranean. There, in his studio, he created countless paintings distinguished by their rigid geometric structure and glowing colors. Landscape in Provence was peculiar, both in terms of its subject matter and the unrealistic colors of the landscape. Although at first glance the work has an "all-over" appearance, after gazing at the picture for a while, we begin to grasp the context of the motif and the depth of the space. But after continuing to look for a bit longer, the picture invites us into a shallow depth created by the paint itself through the arrangement and juxtaposition of colors, and how they resonate in the distance. This experience might be described as a state of endless movement between the surface and depth in the narrow space that exists between the paintcovered surface and the overlapping motifs. Instead of functioning as a seeing subject, we are required to be a body that merely senses the paint. Landscape in Provence was shown at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris from June 15 to 23, 1933 as part of an exhibition that was widely reviewed. In the work, we can detect an antagonism between Bonnard as a painter associated with tradition and an artist who was in the process of embarking on a new phase in painting. Even in terms of the latter, Bonnard was by no means deemed a new avant-garde painter. Rather, he was seen as a painter who employed an unknown method in an extremely humble manner to expand the range of traditional painting. Bonnard's complexity, which cannot simply be explained through dichotomies such as convention and innovation, and figuration and abstraction, was already becoming apparent. Bonnard always used the motif as his starting point, but in order to escape the constraints of a motif's meaning and name, he found it necessary to obscure its contours and form by accentuating the colors and brush touch. In that sense, Landscape in Provence can be seen as one of the most intense concentrations of the artist's intentions.