Must see Pierre Bonnard exhibition coming to Tate Modern

For a man who was once described by Henri Matisse as ‘the greatest of us all,’ time has been unkind to Pierre Bonnard. Doomed by the shadow of his looming Impressionist predecessors, and by the loudness of his modernist contemporaries, the voice of French painter Pierre Bonnard has been largely drowned out over the years.

But, thankfully, not for much longer. In January 2019, the Tate Modern will play host to the first major UK exhibition of Bonnard's work in just over twenty years. The exhibition presents a long overdue opportunity to celebrate the achievements of this innovative French painter, and to reaffirm his position as one of the greatest colourists of the early twentieth century.

Bonnard organised his art around the momentary, the transient – he was a man who attempted to fix the unfixable, and to battle, however improbably, against the ever-shifting tides of time. Bonnard’s figures are often caught in flux – they are stepping into the bath, or putting on clothes, or walking in or out of the painting’s frame.

This much anticipated, long overdue exhibition will trace Bonnard's creative journey from 1912 to his death in 1947. His work from this fruitful period consists mostly of landscapes and intimate domestic scenes, all of which were painted from memory, using drawings and notes as a reference.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Bath and Small Dog, 1941-6

Highlights from the exhibition include the series of nudes, modelled by Bonnard’s wife, Marthe de Meligny. Worth seeing alone are Nude Before the Mirror, 1931, and Nude in the Bath, 1925, both exemplifying Bonnard's unparalleled skill to capture a moment in time on the canvas, always artfully expressed through his masterful handling of colour and composition.

Bonnard encourages us to stand still, to allow time to freeze around us, and to step into a moment in the past, preserved before us as it appeared before him – first in memory, later in paint, and now almost a century old.