Pierre Bonnard was not a revolutionary artist but he synthesized several different styles to create works of striking painterliness and memorably glorious color. He borrowed a lightness from the Impressionists, a bold palette from the Post-Impressionists and Fauves, a compressed dimensionality from Matisse and added an immense intensity of his own. He is better known for his paintings of nude women reclining in their baths, because of their luxuriant and radiant patterning rather than the mostly submerged nudes themselves. |