Pierre BONNARD - The open window (about 1921)

 

The open window

1921
Oil painting on canvas (118x96 cm)
Phillips Collection, Washington

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There are many details that fall into this scene but they are an incomplete corollary and which are barely visible: the interior with an open window, the sleeping female figure and the cat. As observers we are invited to enter this room to look at the trees outside the window.

Thanks to a good use of warm colors, Bonnard makes us perceive the warmth and atmosphere of the south of France, whose light full of brilliance and color everything it illuminates.

The main feature of most of Bonnard's paintings are the intimate and domestic scenes; he was one of the members of the group called Les Nabis, who tended to simplify the strokes and colors in the paintings as much as possible. The Nabis rejected the idea of ​​involving the observer in their works through the subject represented (which will lose more and more importance, as we can see in this work) and aimed at the expression of sensations and feelings through forms, arriving at use flat color on increasingly large surfaces.

Bonnard, thanks to his activity as a lithographer, was one of the most important masters in the use of shapes, colors and lines. His skill has enabled him to become one of the few foreign artists elected to London's Roya Academy.

Comparing artists: Caillebotte, Denis, Hassam, Matisse, Vallotton, Vuillard