Bonnard among friends

Bonnard among friends offers a journey through fifty or so key works lent by prestigious collections and institutions in France and abroad: the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée de l'Orangerie, the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Gallery Larock Granoff, as well as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

The aim of this exhibition, structured around three large sections, is to restore the dialogue with a certain number of artists, including Matisse, Monet, Vuillard, Rippl-Rónai, Camoin and Manguin, that inspires Bonnard. The first part covers the period of profound friendship between the young painters that form the Nabis group. The series of parallel portraits that they produced of each other reflect the closeness between them. The connection between Bonnard and Monet is demonstrated by a different but not conflicting sensitivity towards nature. Finally, the theme of windows and open views, the culmination of Bonnard and Matisse's work, brings this original journey to an end.

The essays by Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Isabelle de Navas and Véronique Serrano which appear in this work provide a new perspective to these pictorial and amicable exchanges. For the first time we are also publishing the complete correspondence written by Pierre Bonnard to George Besson, a critic and photographer with whom he had close links from a very early stage in his career, introduced and annotated by Chantal Duverget. Fully illustrated, this catalogue represents a reference work on this little known aspect of Bonnard's life - his relationship with others.