Pierre Bonnard, Painting Beyond the Boundaries of the Body
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - 5:00pm
Radcliffe Humanities Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG -0 Colin Matthew Room
Speaker: Lucy Whelan
The TORCH Oxford Phenomeonology Network are hosting a talk by Lucy Whelan on 'Pierre Bonnard, painting beyond the boundaries of the body'. This paper questions how visual representation relates to the artist’s conscious experience of the world, through the work of the French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). Examining Bonnard’s late paintings and a remarkable group of his drawings, it demonstrates how his work takes conscious experience beyond the usual boundaries of the senses and argues that his works offer an original critique of 'perceptualist' and 'phenomenological' approaches to art that assume depiction to depend essentially upon an artist’s visual experience. This resituates Bonnard in relation to Impressionism, and moreover argues that Bonnard’s work amounts to a philosophical enquiry that resonates with the writings of the philosopher Henri Bergson.
