Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Login or subscribe to view price data

Pierre Bonnard   1867-1947 PANIER DE FRUITS Signed Oil on canvas 23 3/4 by 18 3/4 in. 60.3 by 47.6 cm. Painted circa 1946. This outstanding late still-life was bought from Bonnard by Pierre Matisse early in 1946, and when he returned to the United States shortly afterwards he asked Bonnard to send the painting to his father. On May 7, 1946, Henri Matisse ended a letter to Bonnard with the words: "I am still cohabiting with your mysterious and alluring canvas" (Bonnard/Matisse: Letters Between Friends, New York, 1991, p. 130). In the messages he sent Matisse during the war, Bonnard showed his habitual stoicism in face of the hardships that had become a part of French daily life: "I wrote to you about my little problem with provisions more to distract you than to stimulate pity. Being three-quarters vegetarian we are not dying of hunger, and I even believe we are no worse off. As for moving to some palatial hotel for a little material comfort, I would lose what constitutes the basis of my existence and my kind of work: the constant contact with nature... what's more, like a prisoner, I receive little packages from family and friends" (ibid., p. 80). The wicker basket of grapes and plums that dominates this still-life, a standard gift basket, was perhaps just such an offering from one of the visitors to Le Bosquet, Bonnard's hillside villa outside Cannes. It can be seen in several photographs taken around 1945-46 (figs. 2 and 3). It was a type of basket Bonnard particularly liked, and one that he had become very familiar with over the years (a similar one, rather smaller in size, appears in many of his paintings from 1916 onwards, fig. 1). The large shallow base, spilling over with fruit, and the high-arching handle provided him with the hollow forms around which he liked to construct a composition. The painter's gaze, however, is concentrated on the fruit whose richly heightened colors touch everything in their vicinity. The surface of the walls, even the air in the room, is affected by the radiance and beauty of the fruit. Bonnard spoke about the need to be 'seduced' by a motif, and in the late paintings, especially the force of this 'seduction' is expressed in colors, and in combinations of colors, that have been so embellished by the artist that they seem beyond the resources of nature herself. The profoundly contemplative, as well as daring, aspects of Bonnard's late work are subsumed in this 'mysterious and alluring canvas'. Just how out of the ordinary Bonnard makes even the most familiar things appear has been well described by Julian Bell: "The logic of the late work often relates less to the solid structures and distances of the world- the third dimension of depth- than to the long mental processes that give shape to experience over time. The way that a fanatically charged violet has come to lurk in the moldings of a window frame is the way that something formerly thought impossible has come to impress itself on us as inevitable; the way that the jugs on a table in a lower corner have developed strange internal harmonies all of their own is the way that we come to learn the language of a country which was once no more than a name... For all these reasons Bonnard's pictures are par excellence commodities for the private patron intended to hang in particular rooms as the objects of repeated comtemplation" (Julian Bell, Bonnard, London 1994, p. 22). This vibrant still life was painted in Le Cannet, a small town in the south of France where Bonnard had purchased a villa in 1925. There the artist was to spend the remaining twenty-two years of his life, during which he produced a body of works inundated by the strong, brilliant light of the Mediterranean that celebrated nature and a quiet but joyful life of domesticity. Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist in 1946) Acquired by Reader's Digest in 1948 Exhibited: New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Reader's Digest Collection, 1963, p. 21 New York, Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago, Bonnard and his Environment, 1964-65, no. 82 Tokyo, Palaceside Building, Forty Paintings from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1966, no. 1 New York, Wildenstein & Co. (traveling exhibition), Selections from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1985-86, pp. 8-9 Auckland City Art Gallery, The Reader's Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso, 1989, pp. 12-13 Literature: Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre peint 1940-1947, vol. 4, Paris, 1974, no. 1679, illustrated p. 97 Michel Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard et Le Cannet, Paris, 1987, illustrated p. 71 Jean Clair, Bonnard/Matisse: Letters Between Friends, New York, 1991, p. 130, illstrated p. 132.