‘Bonnard’s Worlds’ Review: Daily Scenes, Audacious Paintings

Fort Worth, Texas

Pierre Bonnard ranks among the most adventurous and innovative modernist artists. At the same time, he is one of the most responsive to what the painter and critic Andrew Forge called “terrifically real things.” Everything in Bonnard’s mature paintings threatens to dissolve into sheets of ravishing, unstable color and a dizzying array of marks. We revel in seductive, unexpected encounters of staccato touches of eggplant purple and cinnabar red, marzipan pink and dull ochre, mouth-puckering yellow and acid green, almost without thinking about what those gatherings of sensual hues might conjure up. Space pulses and tips.