Tickets are now on sale for Bonnard’s Worlds, the Kimbell Art Museum’s first exhibition dedicated to the works of French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and the first major exhibition of Bonnard’s paintings in Texas in nearly 40 years.
The exhibition will be on display in the Kimbell’s Renzo Piano Pavilion beginning Nov. 5 and continuing through Jan. 28, 2024.
Admission to Bonnard’s Worlds is $18 for adults, $16 for seniors, K-12 educators, students, and military personnel, $14 for ages 6-11, free for children under 6 and $3 for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients. Admission is half-price all day on Tuesdays and after 5 p.m. on Fridays. Admission to the museum’s permanent collection is always free.
The museum is open Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fridays, noon-8 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m.; closed Mondays, New Year’s Day, July 4, Thanksgiving and Christmas. For more information, call 817-332-8451.
Inspired by the museum’s 2018 acquisition of the artist’s Landscape at Le Cannet (1928), the Bonnard’s Words exhibition explores the sensory realms of experience that fueled the painter’s creative practice – from the most public spaces to the most private.
Comprising a careful selection of approximately seventy of Bonnard’s finest works created over the course of his career, Bonnard’s Worlds reunites some of the artist’s most celebrated paintings from museums in Europe and the United States, as well as many unfamiliar to the public from worldwide private collections. Governed neither by chronology nor geography, but by measures of intimacy, the exhibition will transport visitors from the larger realms in which Bonnard lived – the landscapes of Paris, Normandy, or the South of France – to the most private interior spaces of his dwellings and his thoughts.
As opposed to the more sweeping chronological arrangement of a traditional retrospective exhibition, Bonnard’s Worlds creates a series of smaller thematic vignettes in which visitors may experience the subtleties of style and approach throughout the artist’s life. Exhibition didactics are nonobtrusive, allowing visitors to experience the themes largely through looking. As they move through the spaces, visitors are reminded of where the artist has been – both physically and stylistically – giving them the tools to make their own discoveries and reach their own conclusions about the artist and his work.
“The general public is often unaware of Pierre Bonnard and his influence on the trajectory of twentieth century painting,” said Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “A friend of both Monet and Matisse, Bonnard is not only a bridge between impressionism and the post-impressionist movements that followed; he is a painter who forged his own visual style, marked by a uniquely nuanced mastery of color, shaped by complex and evocative compositions, and built around representations of the natural spaces, intimate interiors, and people that comprised his world.”
Organized by the Kimbell Art Museum in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Bonnard’s Worlds is supported in part by Frost, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Kimbell deputy director George Shackelford is the curator of the exhibition in conjunction with The Phillips Collection’s chief curator, Elsa Smithgall.
“I am pleased to introduce Pierre Bonnard to new audiences in a way that is so deeply engaging,” said Shackelford. “Bonnard’s Worlds gives us the opportunity to do what a museum does best: gather an artist’s most significant artworks from around the world, consider them outside of their original time and place, and arrange them in ways that broaden our understanding of not only an artist, but our own personal experiences of life, art, history, and ourselves. I think visitors will learn a great deal, just by looking, and will enjoy the journey through the worlds of this influential painter.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color illustrated catalogue by Shackelford with contributions by Elsa Smithgall, chief curator, The Phillips Collection; Isabelle Cahn, chief curator of paintings (ret.), Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Cyrille Sciama, director, Musée des impressionnismes Giverny; and Véronique Serrano, chief curator, Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet.
In the introduction to the catalogue, Shackelford notes: “Bonnard’s work, without any desire to be autobiographical, nonetheless both chronicles and exposes his life, because almost every work of art he ever made was in large part inspired by the world in which he lived, and by his place in that world.”
Bonnard’s Worlds is one of three new exhibitions that the Kimbell recently announced will be opening in the coming months. The others are: Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries, June 16-Sept. 15, 2024; and Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Nov. 10, 2024-Feb. 9, 2025.
About the Kimbell
The Kimbell Art Museum, owned and operated by the Kimbell Art Foundation, is internationally renowned for both its collections and its architecture. The Kimbell’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century and include European masterpieces by artists such as Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Velázquez, Vigée Le Brun, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse; important collections of Egyptian and classical antiquities; and the art of Asia, Africa and the Ancient Americas. The museum’s 1972 building, designed by the American architect Louis I. Kahn, is widely regarded as one of the outstanding architectural achievements of the modern era. A second building, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, opened in 2013 and now provides space for special exhibitions, dedicated classrooms and a 289-seat auditorium with excellent acoustics for music. For more information, visit the museum’s website.
Information for this article was provided by the Kimbell Art Museum.