Pierre Bonnard
Denver Art Museum
100 West 14th Avenue Pkwy
March 1–May 25, 2003
The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street NW
September 22, 2002–January 19, 2003
Curated by Elizabeth Hutton Turner
The stated aim of this show is to reconcile the early work of Pierre Bonnard, Parisian painter, designer, and illustrator of the 1890s, with the late work—the interiors, landscapes, and figures painted chiefly in the south of France from the ’30s to his death in 1947. But surely this artificial division has long been healed? Nevertheless, by examining all the media in which the artist worked, the exhibition, selected by senior curator Elizabeth Hutton Turner, attempts to uncover yet further consistencies of means and themes in the “two” Bonnards—poet of the boulevards and recluse of the Riviera.