Pierre Bonnard

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1925)

Georges Lurcy, Paris (acquired from the above and sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, November 7, 1957, lot 48)

Rosenberg & Stiebel Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Henry Ford II, Detroit (acquired from the above in 1957 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 1990, lot 15)

Jan Krugier Gallery (acquired at the above sale)

Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1998

Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Pierre Bonnard: Das Glück zu maleu, 1993, no. 37

Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Pierre Bonnard, 1992-1993, no. 73, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Bonnard, 1994, no. 107, illustrated in color in the catalogue

London, Tate Gallery & New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Bonnard, 1998, no. 49

Thadée Natanson, Le Bonnard que je propose, Geneva, 1951, illustrated pl. 48 (incorrectly dated circa 1919)

L'Oeil, Paris, December 1957, p. 90 (article related to the Lurcy sale)

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, vol. III, Paris, 1973, no. 1331, illustrated p. 269

Sarah Whitfield & John Elderfield, Bonnard, New York, 1998, no. 49, illustrated in color p. 151

Painted in luminous yellows, blues and pinks, the present work is one of Bonnard’s major nudes. Bonnard’s paintings of the female nude are the most renowned within his oeuvre.  The primary model for these canvases was the eccentric Marthe de Meligny, a young woman of elusive origin whom Bonnard met in Paris in 1893 and would become his wife in 1925. Bonnard executed portraits of Marthe across multiple mediums including photography, but it is his paintings of her that are bathed in luxurious color and build upon compositional complexities that are novel within the Modernist canon. Sarah Whitfield writes, “Bonnard began painting pictures of Marthe washing early on (from the 1900s), rather in the manner of Degas who had made the subject of feminine hygiene his own.  The subject of the nude washing herself in a round zinc tub was one Bonnard treated at least a dozen times in the period between 1914 and 1917. These works are concerned above all with composition, combining Bonnard’s favorite device of creating a painting around an empty space, preferably a round void (for which the tub provided the best possible pretext) with his attachment to classical sculpture (the nude crouching in the tub is surely a series of variations on the theme of the Crouching Aphrodite in the Louvre)” (S. Whitfield, Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London & The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 28).

As Whitfield mentions, Bonnard’s intimate depictions of nudes are indebted to the tradition of Degas, whose pastels of women at their toilette were a great source of inspiration for the artist. In the present work, Bonnard chose a soft palette similar in tonality to Degas’s delicate pastels, however, the medium of oil allows for a clearly defined depiction of the figure. Bonnard enhanced the balance of this composition by adding a strongly defined geometry to the background of the sensuous figure.

The monumental nude depicted in the bathroom, as in the present work, was a major recurring theme in Bonnard’s work from his early years until his death in 1947.  Sasha Newman discusses the early influential nudes as follows: “This early exploration of the female subject culminated in a series of nudes painted in the years preceding the turn of the century, including L’Homme et la femme, L’Indolente, and La Sieste, which resonate with an explicit eroticism unique in Bonnard’s work.  The emotional charge of these paintings continues to inform his later nudes – modulated, transformed, but ever present – and becomes the central feature in so many of the interiors in the early years of the twentieth century.  Bonnard’s obsession with the nude is generally focused on the lonely, solitary figure of Marthe” (Pierre Bonnard: the Late Paintings (exhibition catalogue), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. & Dallas museum of Art, 1984, p. 108).

Considering the rich symbolism of Bonnard’s paintings of the nude, John Elderfield has written about the significance of the nude’s intense focus on her own body, and the voyeurism inherent in these paintings: “The self-absorption is, of course, an apartness. But the prolonged, extended, unhurried activity only apparently excludes the beholder, who waits and watches and can imagine closeness amounting to an identification with the never-ageing, painted woman (‘He looked after her, feared her, put up with her, loved her; a common friend wrote: ‘her identity almost merged with his in the constant anxiety she caused him’) Not just looked at but looked after, Marthe is supported in these paintings, which are among Bonnard’s slowest, their slowness bespeaking the tactile solicitude of the gaze” (J. Elderfield, “Seeing Bonnard”, in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 45).

For most of its history, the present work has remained in the family of Georges Lurcy (1891-1953), the prominent collector of Impressionist and Modern Art.  While an executive at the Rothschilde bank in France, Lurcy (born Georges Lévy) rose quickly to the top of his profession and his genius as in investor in hydroplanes made him a large fortune during World War I.  Lurcy amassed an astounding treasure trove of paintings by the great masters of late 19^th and early 20^th century art while living in France in the 1930s with his young American wife, Alice Snow Barbee.  Prior to leaving France for the United States in 1940, he briefly served as a resistance fighter and gave his château at Meslay le Vidame to the town’s mayor to be converted into a sanitarium.  Changing his name from Lévy to Lurcy to protect his family at the outbreak of war, Lurcy and his wife Alice Snow Barbee brought their exceptional collection to the United States, establishing homes on Fifth Avenue in New York and at Chapel Hill, where Georges enrolled in classes at the University.  Students at the time remembered him for his supreme generosity and his approachable genius.  In 1957 the lion's share of Lurcy's collection, including the present work, was sold at a historic single-owner auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York.  Nu s'habillant was acquired at that sale through a dealer by Henry Ford II, heir to the eponymous automotive fortune, and it remained in the Ford family's legendary collection in Detroit for over thirty years.