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拍品专文
Like many of the young artists who were affiliated with the modernist avant-garde on the cusp of the 20th century, Bonnard was a quick and early starter, and he made some remarkable pictures before he was only twenty-five. Painted in 1889, La rue represented the cutting-edge style of a new anti-naturalist tendency in the arts, derived from the Symbolist movement in literature led by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose creed was "to paint, not the thing itself, but the effect it produces" (quoted in H. Weinfield, trans., Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, Berkeley, 1994, p. 169). Only the year before, painting for Bonnard had been a part-time vocation; having taken a degree in law, he worked a day job as a minor government official. He had recently completed his obligatory military service and returned to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Bonnard was fortunate, however, to fall in with other young painters who were eager to seize upon new ideas. In 1887 he took classes at the Académie Julian, were he met Paul Sérusier, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Paul Ranson and Maurice Denis.
Bonnard was present in October 1888 when Sérusier returned from a stay in Pont-Aven and showed his friends at the Académie Julian a small landscape he had painted on the lid of a cigar box under the guidance of Paul Gauguin. This picture was like no other they had ever seen; the woodland and pond-side scene had been composed with pure, brilliant colors applied in a patch-like arrangement on the little panel. It was an epiphany--they immediately recognized that this was the art of the future, and they called this magical painting Le talisman (Guicheteau, no. 2; Musée d'Orsay, Paris). They formed their own society of the initiated, and called themselves 'Nabis,' from the Hebrew word for prophet. In 1890 Denis published his celebrated dictum that "a picture--before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote--is essentially a plane surface covered with colors in a certain order" (quoted in G. Groom, Beyond the Easel, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 17). The example of Gauguin remained important to Bonnard throughout his career, and near the end of his life he kept a postcard reproduction of Gauguin's La vision après le sermon (Wildenstein, no. 245/308; fig. 2) on his studio wall, as seen in a photograph taken by Cartier-Bresson in 1944.
While the Nabis circle shared an interest in the flat and decorative surface of sythétisme, Bonnard - and Vuillard as well - avoided from the outset the mystical and religious subject matter to which many of their colleagues had gravitated as they played out their infatuation with Gauguin's Symbolist conception of pictorial content. Bonnard chose instead to treat secular subjects drawn from daily life. He especially admired Degas and Lautrec; John Rewald observed that ''Their approach and treatment of their subjects must have encouraged Bonnard to turn his back on Symbolism and focus his attention on what he had always loved, his surroundings. Thus Bonnard set out to capture in his work what no other painter of his time had observed: the little incidents of Parisian life Bonnard descended into the streets and squares, watching with equal interest people, horses, dogs, and trees" (in Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., New York, 1948, pp. 24-25).
La rue is a snapshot of daily Parisian life. The artist has depicted this occasion extremely close-up, as if the viewer were seated at the terrace of a café. The constricted sense of space is more like an interior setting than an outdoor scene, Bonnard has reduced all the forms of the figures and their attire into sinuously contoured, flat colour shapes, in the Japanese manner. He wanted, as he said, "to see form simply as a flat silhouette" (quoted in T. Hyman, Bonnard, London 1998, p. 21). Bonnard teases the eye, forcing the viewer to take the time to unravel the forms in order to read the content of his picture. Indeed, the viewer's eye reads various shapes first as colour forms, before it becomes apparent precisely what they represent. Bonnard's talent for this pictorial sleight of hand is most evident in his radical early Nabis pictures, such as La rue and later in lot 329 of this sale Jeune fille avec chien, painted in 1894 (Dauberville, no. 84).
Bonnard was present in October 1888 when Sérusier returned from a stay in Pont-Aven and showed his friends at the Académie Julian a small landscape he had painted on the lid of a cigar box under the guidance of Paul Gauguin. This picture was like no other they had ever seen; the woodland and pond-side scene had been composed with pure, brilliant colors applied in a patch-like arrangement on the little panel. It was an epiphany--they immediately recognized that this was the art of the future, and they called this magical painting Le talisman (Guicheteau, no. 2; Musée d'Orsay, Paris). They formed their own society of the initiated, and called themselves 'Nabis,' from the Hebrew word for prophet. In 1890 Denis published his celebrated dictum that "a picture--before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote--is essentially a plane surface covered with colors in a certain order" (quoted in G. Groom, Beyond the Easel, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 17). The example of Gauguin remained important to Bonnard throughout his career, and near the end of his life he kept a postcard reproduction of Gauguin's La vision après le sermon (Wildenstein, no. 245/308; fig. 2) on his studio wall, as seen in a photograph taken by Cartier-Bresson in 1944.
While the Nabis circle shared an interest in the flat and decorative surface of sythétisme, Bonnard - and Vuillard as well - avoided from the outset the mystical and religious subject matter to which many of their colleagues had gravitated as they played out their infatuation with Gauguin's Symbolist conception of pictorial content. Bonnard chose instead to treat secular subjects drawn from daily life. He especially admired Degas and Lautrec; John Rewald observed that ''Their approach and treatment of their subjects must have encouraged Bonnard to turn his back on Symbolism and focus his attention on what he had always loved, his surroundings. Thus Bonnard set out to capture in his work what no other painter of his time had observed: the little incidents of Parisian life Bonnard descended into the streets and squares, watching with equal interest people, horses, dogs, and trees" (in Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., New York, 1948, pp. 24-25).
La rue is a snapshot of daily Parisian life. The artist has depicted this occasion extremely close-up, as if the viewer were seated at the terrace of a café. The constricted sense of space is more like an interior setting than an outdoor scene, Bonnard has reduced all the forms of the figures and their attire into sinuously contoured, flat colour shapes, in the Japanese manner. He wanted, as he said, "to see form simply as a flat silhouette" (quoted in T. Hyman, Bonnard, London 1998, p. 21). Bonnard teases the eye, forcing the viewer to take the time to unravel the forms in order to read the content of his picture. Indeed, the viewer's eye reads various shapes first as colour forms, before it becomes apparent precisely what they represent. Bonnard's talent for this pictorial sleight of hand is most evident in his radical early Nabis pictures, such as La rue and later in lot 329 of this sale Jeune fille avec chien, painted in 1894 (Dauberville, no. 84).