Bonnard vs Vuillard

for me it might as well be terry + the idiots vs the vapors, not particularly arsed about either tbh.

Yeah i picked these guys because they were both right there at the forefront of post impressionism but today are kind of footnotes. Something in their work seems more... precious? fanciful?... than gauguin or van gogh and consequently less modern. However, both created some great paintings too.

I think they were both just mediocrities really, their work to me is bad impressionism as a stylistic device rather than an experimental form of looking and responding to light and nature - see also Renoir. But ignore me - this be juss my humble opinion.

bonnard for me. very good cats in his work

Oh you’re an anti-renoir dude! So yeah, of course you’d hate these guys. I tend to like the early renoir but agree late renoir isnt great.

At least bonnard saw his work as being extremely different from jnpressionism fwiw. He painted from memory, not life.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

"At the artist’s last retrospective, the critic David Sylvester told me that if I didn’t get Bonnard, I didn’t get painting."
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jan/21/pierre-bonnard-the-colour-of-memory-review-tate-modern-london

My life drawing tutor is also crazy about him. He might not be as well known as Cezanne or Monet but he's not a footnote. However I just don't get it.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/53450a26fc05c357994e73c64b36d03f6f94bb2d/0_81_5243_3145/master/5243.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=b79780be7f1dc715ecf9af415a4ba948

Is she bathing in soup? What's going on with the far edge of the bath? Why is her leg as straight as a ramrod? All this and horrible patchy brushwork.

David Sylvester clearly doesn't know his arse from his elbow, lol if he thinks Bonnard (who is essentially an amateurist chocolate box picture maker) is one of the great talents of post-impressionism.

calzino is RONG. Both are great but going with Vuillard ftw.

I'll fite you + D Sylvester!

Although Bonnard avoided public attention, his work sold well during his life. At the time of his death his reputation had already been eclipsed by subsequent avant-garde developments in the art world; reviewing a retrospective of Bonnard's work in Paris in 1947, Christian Zervos assessed the artist in terms of his relationship to Impressionism, and found him wanting. "In Bonnard's work," he wrote, "Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline."[16] In response Henri Matisse wrote "I maintain that Bonnard is a great artist for our time and, naturally, for posterity."[17]

very benevolent + generous of Matisse there, but utter bollox!

There is definitely something repellent about many of Bonnard’s canvases but things start to make sense the more I look at them

The Nabis weren't impressionists per se so much as they were responding to broader symbolist trends in the arts – and Cézanne. There's a reason they focus so heavily on interior spaces, unlike their plein air predecessors. Relative dearth of light (or blindness as inner sight, much like deafness as inner hearing via Beethoven) in painting is fascinating to me.

Bonnard’s paintings are about memory, not vision

Or memory as vision or vision as memory, Proust-style.

I can understand retreating into your bolt-hole studio and making a style of risk-free picturesque art - that sort of looks like what was cutting edge decades earlier but doesn't involve looking anymore, especially in the context of the Great War and the gathering storms etc, but it's not for me.

The subject matter may not directly foreshadow the Great War, but the breakdown of conventional figuration isn't too far off.

An approximate aural analogue would be Ravel's La Valse.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Bonnard destroyed

lol that i forgot to vote for bonnard

Is she bathing in soup? What's going on with the far edge of the bath? Why is her leg as straight as a ramrod? All this and horrible patchy brushwork.

― large bananas pregnant (ledge)

jabba the hutt has great legs