Pierre Bonnard: Affinities

Jill Newhouse Gallery will present a selection of paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Pierre Bonnard together with works by contemporary artists who have absorbed his influence, including Graham Nickson, Larry Poons, Cecily Kahn, Julian Hatton, Rachel Rickert and Jackie Saccoccio.
WORKS BY BONNARD
On view will be 23 works by Bonnard of all periods: a small early painting of Marthe (1905) walking down a Paris street, 2 fully colored landscapes in watercolor and gouache from the 1920s, numerous pencil drawings of figures, still-lifes and landscapes of France and Italy, culminating in two iconic depictions of Marthe in the bathtub - a large complete pencil drawing of 1936 and a richly colored large scale gouache done in 1942.
Pierre Bonnard has influenced generations of painters who admire his devotion to color and the way he applied paint to canvas. Such is the case for example with Damien Hirst who claims Bonnard as the inspiration for his upcoming show by at Gagosian Galleries. Bonnard’s choice of subject matter, banal scenes from his own daily life, are rich with implied meanings and suggestive narratives depicted in a rainbow assortment of primary colors.
In his drawings, Bonnard’s rapid economic line activates the page in unique ways, by using dots and dashes and squiggles. Bonnard was a constant draughtsman and relied on his drawings to create his painted compositions. In fact photos of the artist at work show drawings pinned up on the wall around an unstretched canvas still in progress.
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
Graham Nickson is a well known figurative painter who is also head of the New York Studio School. Larry Poons has been painting abstractly since the 1960s when his floating elliptical shapes became well known. Cecily Kahn, Julian Hatton and Jackie Saccoccio have responded with abstraction to Bonnard’s vibrant colors, while Rachel Rickert, the youngest artist, has taken Bonnard’s bathers as her inspiration.
CATALOGUE AUTHOR
The contemporary works in this show have been curated by Karen Wilkin, a New York-based independent curator and art critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, to Rome. Wilkin has organized numerous exhibitions internationally and is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Hans Hofmann. Her recent projects include a Hofmann retrospective for the Naples Art Museum, Florida, and, with William C. Agee, the introductory essays for the Stuart Davis Catalogue Raisonné. She is the Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Art in America, and the Wall Street Journal.