Pierre Bonnard’s Books: An Interpretation

Abstract

During Pierre Bonnard’s lifetime and since, critics and writers have romanticized his life as rural and hermetic. The artist’s villa in Le Cannet, where he lived from 1926, three kilometers inland from Cannes, has often been portrayed as a retreat from the world. One writer on Bonnard even described it as a “white wooden hut” that left the artist “quite alone on his mountain, in communion with the sky.” This notion of Bonnard as a recluse in the Midi still lingers today, not least since it coincides so neatly with the way Bonnard has been treated since his death in 1947 as an outsider from the modern canon. Yet Bonnard