Nude in an Interior

If you know anything about Bonnard, you probably know that he was a Post-Impressionist who, along with Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and others, formed an esoteric group in the early 1890s calling itself Les Nabis (the Prophets). Their work had a strong Art Nouveau mood to it - drawing on nature, poster-graphic, proudly decorative and subdued in color.“Nude in an Interior,” is a great, near-abstract composition - azure and turquoise rectangles against shades of amber and ruby - in which a door frame neatly slices through a female figure, creating a hard, straight edge at one side of the body in contrast to the voluptuous outline on the other.More than simply formal tricks, these compositional decisions have a narrative, almost novellike power about them. It’s impossible to guess what the precise story might be; but the image of the nude caught through the doorway has a potency that full-on description would not. Are we peaking? Is she merely incidental, not worthy of our full attention? Is she primping for us, or in spite of our presence?

Good questions!