Collections Management Assistant Tara Keny takes a close look at some of the witty lithographs Pierre Bonnard created for a children's music theory book written by his brother-in-law.

Bonnard explicitly admitted that he could only paint the familiar. The rituals of daily life—taking tea, feeding the cat, tending to the dinner table—were his subjects.

In 1889 Pierre Bonnard, then in his early twenties, was commissioned to design a poster for a brand of champagne. When his spirited creation—the image of a belle suggesting in disarming fashion the pleasures to be had from a glass of bubbly—made its appearance on the streets of Paris, it was an instant success, helping to launch Bonnard on his career as a professional artist. The poster France-Champagne also introduced him to color lithography, a medium popular with artists and public alike both for its creative possibilities and as a means of bringing art to a wider audience. For many years the graphic arts continued to play a seminal role in Bonnard's development. Where his sympathies were engaged, he proved to be a born illustrator, with the knack of communicating his subject in a manner distinctly his own. His witty, seemingly casual designs were in demand for posters and for covers of books and sheet music. He contributed lithographs to print portfolios and illustrations, often irreverent, to the avant-garde periodicals of his day. With his brother-in-law, the musician Claude Terrasse, he produced a children's music primer and an album of piano pieces for the family that show him to have been an observant uncle with a sense of fun. He even created a multiple, a folding screen whose four lithographic panels, depicting a fashionable mother and her children out for a walk, brought the Paris street indoors. The culminating legacy of those years at the turn of the century lay in the three great works of lithography that Bonnard published through his dealer Ambroise Vollard: a portfolio of city scenes, Quelques Aspects de la vie de Paris, and two illustrated deluxe books, very different in their content, Verlaine's Parallèlement and the antique pastoral romance Daphnis et Chloe. They were not an overwhelming success at the time, and Parallèlement in particular was criticized for Bonnard's bold treatment of the printed page. But from a later perspective they are unsurpassed examples of the art of the peintre-lithographe. As painting became more and more the center of Bonnard's life, and as he moved away from Paris, making a home first in the Seine Valley and then in the South of France, his involvement with the graphic arts inevitably diminished. But he never lost touch with them, and to the end of his life seems always to have been open to requests from friends and publishers to supply lithographs, etchings, and book illustrations. Bonnard's graphic production can be seen as the public face of his art, the one that shows him at his most gregarious and entertaining. To be fully appreciated this material needs to be studied in light of the artist's oeuvre as a whole. By analyzing the broad themes that engaged Bonnard's attention—scenes of family life, Paris vistas and activities, the intimate nude, and familiar landscapes—the authors trace his development from the concise abstractions of his youth to the expansive, color-filled works of his maturity. Their essays, lavishly documented with reproductions and comparative material, demonstrate the profound extent to which Bonnard's vision as a painter was related to and affected by his activities as a printmaker and illustrator. Colta Ives is the Curator-in-charge of the Department of Prints and Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a specialist in nineteenth-century French prints. Helen Giambruni is a Bonnard scholar whose studies have focused on his early works. Sasha M. Newman, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of European and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, is an expert on Bonnard's later paintings. Their individual insights and combined knowledge of the subject make them uniquely qualified to illuminate a vivid and relatively little known aspect of Bonnard's genius.

The vibrant late paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) are considered by many to be among his finest achievements. Working in a small covered bedroom of his villa in the south of France, Bonnard suffused his last canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand-usually everyday scenes taken from his immediate surroundings, such as the dining room table being set for breakfast, or a jug of flowers perched on the mantelpiece—Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he preferred to make pencil sketches in small diaries and then rely on these, along with his memory, once in the studio. Bonnard's late interiors thus often conflate details from his daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear and disappear at the margins of these canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit, dishes, or other still-life props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. This volume, which accompanies the first exhibition to focus on the interior and related still-life imagery from the last decades of Bonnard's long career, presents more than seventy-five paintings, drawings, and works on paper, many of them rarely seen in public and in some cases, little known. Although Bonnard's legacy may be removed from the succession of trends that today we consider the foundation of modernism, his contribution to French art in the early decades of the twentieth century is far more profound than history has generally acknowledged. In their insightful essays and catalogue entries the authors bring fresh critical perspectives to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard's reputation and to his place within the narrative of twentieth-century art.

To bolster the grandiose claims of his publications, Didot hired the preeminent painter of the era, Jacques Louis David, to edit the illustrations.

Acclaimed French artist Pierre Huyghe has spent the past twenty-five years experimenting in a great variety of media, from drawing and film to uncommon components such as living animals, plants, and other natural elements. His new project, Rite Passage (2015), conceived and created for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore the transformation of cultural and biological systems through the Museum’s collection, architecture, and surroundings. This fascinating and informative book is the third in a series that documents and contextualizes the Met’s annual rooftop commissions. The introductory essay by Ian Alteveer discusses the nineteenth-century scientific and artistic endeavors that have long inspired Huyghe. The dynamic interview between the artist and Sheena Wagstaff explores the conceptual framework for Huyghe’s latest project as well as the wide-ranging sources that inform this remarkable event.