“Landscape at Le Cannet” by Pierre Bonnard Acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum
On view beginning August 31, 2018
Kimbell Art Museum
Fort Worth, Texas
Kimbellart.org
The Kimbell Art Museum announced today the acquisition of a major painting by Pierre Bonnard, one of the most admired artists of the 20th century. “Landscape at Le Cannet,” the first work by Bonnard to enter the Museum’s collection, was painted in 1928 and depicts the colorful, sun-washed landscape surrounding the artist’s villa near Cannes, in the south of France. Suffused with the brilliant colors of the Cote d’Azur, the large canvas, around nine feet in width, is the latest in a distinguished group of landscape paintings in the Museum’s collection, extending from Bonnard’s beloved Monet and Cézanne back through the centuries to the Italian Renaissance. “Landscape at Le Cannet” is on view beginning, Friday, August 31, in the Kimbell’s Louis I. Kahn Building.
“In Landscape at Le Cannet,” Bonnard portrays the landscape around his villa as an Earthly paradise, with human beings in harmony with nature,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell. “The painting, with its intense Mediterranean light and color, will look spectacular in the Texas light of the Kimbell.”
The painting is first recorded hanging on the wall in Bonnard’s Paris apartment in 1930. His friend Édouard Vuillard painted a portrait there of Bonnard’s city studio, showing the artist looking intently at “Landscape at Le Cannet.”
Image:
Pierre Bonnard, Landscape at Le Cannet, 1928, oil on canvas, 50 3/8 x 109 ½ in. (128 x 278.2 cm). Signed (lower right) “Bonnard”
