Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision

Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision (Yale University Press, 2022) offers an enriched account of modern art in the decades after impressionism through a radically new interpretation of the work of painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), whose long career spans the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bringing together close study of Bonnard’s paintings, drawings, photographs and prints alongside an unparalleled study of his written sources, it explores how he reimagined perception, embodiment, and the passage of time. In so doing, it reveals how Bonnard was engaged in avant-garde forms of experimentation that complicated the relationship between vision and representation in innovative ways. 

“A highly original account of the artist’s work, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision is far-reaching in its import and consequence for the understanding and reconceptualization of European modernist painting of the early twentieth century.”

Carol Armstrong, Professor of History of Art, Yale University

“Using close visual analysis and a careful reading of the artist’s writings, Lucy Whelan offers a welcome new account of Pierre Bonnard’s art. His late paintings in particular emerge from this book in a new light: complex, sophisticated, deeply human.”

Marnin Young, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Yeshiva University, and author of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time