In 2024, the Hôtel de Caumont will dedicate its summer exhibition to the genius of Pierre Bonnard and the influence on him of Japanese art. This will be the first exhibition on the subject, showing how Bonnard – once known as the “Nabi très japonard” (very Japanese Nabi) – assimilated the aesthetics of Japanese art into his treatment of space, time and movement, creating works that renounced naturalism and impressionism. Works by the French painter will be exhibited alongside Japanese prints to illustrate the similarities and formal affinities between them, and the importance for Bonnard of this source of inspiration.

A member of the Nabi group, at the end of the 19th century, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) shook up the development of artistic modernity with the subtlety of his representation of visual sensations. Bonnard divided his time between the Paris region, Normandy and Isère, as well as the Côte d’Azur, where he bought a house in Le Cannet, near Aix-en-Provence. The bustling life of cities, the pleasures of country life, and landscapes bathed by the golden light of the Midi were all pretexts for the artist to develop a new manner of depicting movement, and for far-reaching reflection on the treatment of colour, the fleeting feelings of everyday life, and the beauty of nature. A painter of the joys of life, his vibrant works reveal an unmatched understanding of colour and its infinite variations.

Beginning in the 1860s, for a period of almost half a century, a vogue for all things Japanese spread through France and then England, in particular as a result of Japan’s participation in the 1867 World’s Fair. Bonnard was interested very early on by the characteristics of Ukiyo-e prints, a Japanese term meaning “image of the floating world”. The exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-arts in the spring of 1890 was a true revelation for him, marking the moment when he turned his attention away from the representation of reality and embraced new aesthetic principles, such as the fluidity of movement, contrasting colours, sinuous lines, a pronounced fondness for decoration and stylised elements, and the flattening of space. From that time on, his style was truly marked by japonisme, a term coined in 1872 by Philippe Burty to refer to the influence of Japan on Western art.

Bonnard, the master of colour, was also inspired by the estrangement from reality of Japanese art, which gave artists great freedom in the construction of their images, allowing the coexistence of several spaces and temporalities. But what really enraptured Bonnard was the vividness of the colours used in Japanese prints, especially in those hung up in his bedroom: “I understood from my contact with these crude popular images that colour could express anything, like here, without the need for relief or modelling. It seemed to me that it was possible to convey light, form and character with colour alone”