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拍品專文
Tomates, a lively and charming picture painted by Bonnard circa 1924, is a testament to the artist’s mastery of the still life genre. In this intimate scene, five brightly colored tomatoes are placed on a silver plate, on top of a finely decorated tablecloth, reflecting the glimmering bright sunlight of Le Cannet, where this picture was likely painted.
At the time of its execution, Bonnard was a well-established artist. In 1924, Galerie Druet organized his first retrospective showing sixty-eight of his works, solidifying his status as one of the most distinguished painters in the contemporary art scene. At the end of the same year, the artist rented the villa ‘Le Rêve’ in Le Cannet, a coastal town in the South of France that became central in his production. The following year he married Marthe, his life-long beloved companion.
Bonnard’s long-standing success and mature age (he was fifty-seven at the time) did not hinder his youthful sense of artistic experimentation. Encouraged by his accomplishments, accolades and prosperity, his explorations of color and light are at their finest and most creative in the 1920s, as the present picture perfectly encapsulates.
The close and oblique cropping of the painting places its subject in close proximity to the viewer, making Bonnard’s characteristic soft interplay between light and color even more apparent: his unique abilities to structure his composition through color are at their finest in this scene. His fellow painter André Lhote seemed to notice precisely this when he wrote that: "the painter perceives the solid element and his arrangement with the nearby element. It is thus that the red of the tomatoes, next to the one of the table below, will provide him with an excuse for a crimson surface which divides the table in two areas along a diagonal line (…), since composition in Bonnard is built most of all through colour: it is not reducible simply to a drawing on a canvas." (op. cit., Paris, 1956, p. 208)
Here, sunlight pervades every single object. The tomatoes are depicted not as the main protagonists, but more as part of a larger ensemble, a unified composition with their plate, tablecloth and background. As Dita Amory has stated, "There is an unusual democracy of means in Bonnard’s works in which equal attention is paid to every component of a painting. Negative spaces are as important as positive forms, table edges are as significant as plates; each part gives expression to the whole. The transformative qualities of color and light that took hold in Bonnard’s late paintings rendered even the voids, the often mysterious spaces in between" (‘The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings’, Pierre Bonnard. The Late Still Lives and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 8).
There are no other known examples of still lives by Bonnard depicting tomatoes—a significant exception for an artist who, twenty years after the completion of this painting, confessed his difficulty in "introducing a new object in his still lives," stating that "for fifty years I have kept coming to the same subjects" (K. Terechkovitch, "Quand je brossais le portrait de Bonnard," Opera: l’hebdomadaire du théâtre, du cinéma, des lettres et des arts, Paris, 5 February 1947). With their distinct, vivid red color and their soft roundness, tomatoes such as the ones depicted here are a magnificent subject for a delicate colorists like Bonnard.
At the time of its execution, Bonnard was a well-established artist. In 1924, Galerie Druet organized his first retrospective showing sixty-eight of his works, solidifying his status as one of the most distinguished painters in the contemporary art scene. At the end of the same year, the artist rented the villa ‘Le Rêve’ in Le Cannet, a coastal town in the South of France that became central in his production. The following year he married Marthe, his life-long beloved companion.
Bonnard’s long-standing success and mature age (he was fifty-seven at the time) did not hinder his youthful sense of artistic experimentation. Encouraged by his accomplishments, accolades and prosperity, his explorations of color and light are at their finest and most creative in the 1920s, as the present picture perfectly encapsulates.
The close and oblique cropping of the painting places its subject in close proximity to the viewer, making Bonnard’s characteristic soft interplay between light and color even more apparent: his unique abilities to structure his composition through color are at their finest in this scene. His fellow painter André Lhote seemed to notice precisely this when he wrote that: "the painter perceives the solid element and his arrangement with the nearby element. It is thus that the red of the tomatoes, next to the one of the table below, will provide him with an excuse for a crimson surface which divides the table in two areas along a diagonal line (…), since composition in Bonnard is built most of all through colour: it is not reducible simply to a drawing on a canvas." (op. cit., Paris, 1956, p. 208)
Here, sunlight pervades every single object. The tomatoes are depicted not as the main protagonists, but more as part of a larger ensemble, a unified composition with their plate, tablecloth and background. As Dita Amory has stated, "There is an unusual democracy of means in Bonnard’s works in which equal attention is paid to every component of a painting. Negative spaces are as important as positive forms, table edges are as significant as plates; each part gives expression to the whole. The transformative qualities of color and light that took hold in Bonnard’s late paintings rendered even the voids, the often mysterious spaces in between" (‘The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings’, Pierre Bonnard. The Late Still Lives and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 8).
There are no other known examples of still lives by Bonnard depicting tomatoes—a significant exception for an artist who, twenty years after the completion of this painting, confessed his difficulty in "introducing a new object in his still lives," stating that "for fifty years I have kept coming to the same subjects" (K. Terechkovitch, "Quand je brossais le portrait de Bonnard," Opera: l’hebdomadaire du théâtre, du cinéma, des lettres et des arts, Paris, 5 February 1947). With their distinct, vivid red color and their soft roundness, tomatoes such as the ones depicted here are a magnificent subject for a delicate colorists like Bonnard.