“It’s not a matter of painting life. It’s a matter of giving life to painting,” Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) wrote in his last year. More than a decade earlier, in 1932, he noted in a daybook:
Show nature when it’s beautiful. Everything has its moment of beauty. Beauty is the fulfillment of seeing. Seeing is fulfilled by simplicity and order. Simplicity and order are produced by dividing legible surfaces, grouping compatible colors, etc.
These sentiments were well illustrated by “Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing,” a tightly focused but comprehensive exhibition at Acquavella Galleries that allowed us to explore some of the painter’s major themes from 1916 until his last years.1 Each of the twenty-one included works was vivid evidence of Bonnard’s desire to give life to painting, his belief that everything has its moment of beauty, and his quest for simplicity and order, manifest as visions of banal domesticity translated into meditations on the power of color to stir our emotions. About half a dozen of the paintings on view were deservedly familiar—wholly characteristic, well-known works on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a few private collections. All these pictures have been included in the major Bonnard exhibitions of the past quarter-century.
But the majority of the works at Acquavella were less-known, privately owned versions of some of Bonnard’s most recognizable motifs: nudes, almost always his
