Marthe bonnard biography of albert

Marthe Bonnard is a perpetual presence throughout the artist Pierre Bonnard’s work. From his early illustrations in the s to his last luminous canvases of the s, she is the subject of hundreds if not thousands of paintings and drawings.

Yet art history has long been unkind to Marthe.

Pierre Bonnard (October 3, –January 23, ) was a French painter who helped provide a bridge between impressionism and the abstraction explored by post-.

Born on October 3, in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, Bonnard studied law at the Sorbonne, graduating in During this time, he was also enrolled at the.

Pierre Bonnard () is among the most enigmatic of the great masters of twentieth- century painting.

Marthe became his principal subject for the rest of his life.

Visions of Marthe Bonnard.

Bonnard’s lustrous baignoires are believed to reflect her neurotic obsession with bathing, while his supposedly reclusive life in the south of France in the s is usually explained by Marthe’s reputed paranoia and hatred of other people.

In more recent decades, their relationship has been the subject of exhibition catalogues, novels, and a lot of journalism. With every exhibition of his work, similar headlines appear: “In the bath with Mrs Bonnard: how the painter’s difficult marriage inspired his spellbinding art.”

But, having spent many years researching Bonnard, I have found that much of what is believed about Marthe may be false.

New evidence in the Burlington Magazine reveals that she married a