For anyone who delights in color and light on canvas, the Phillips Collection’s latest exhibition can’t be missed.

Bonnard’s Worlds doesn’t take the typical route of a retrospective and serves the viewer all the better for it. Instead of a chronological exploration of Pierre Bonnard’s work, we’re taken on a journey by setting and place. Paintings made decades apart but inspired by the same locale hang side by side.

“This is an artist who is so steeped in communicating through art his intangible thoughts and feelings,” Phillips chief curator Elsa Smithgall told The Washington Diplomat. “It just became a kind of organizing idea to say: What if we look at Bonnard’s work through that lens and start with the exterior world, beautiful sundrenched landscapes and luscious gardens and views on the terrace, and gradually make our way into those quieter moments, the domestic spaces of his homes?”

A big year for France made even bigger

It’s a big year for France, the country of Bonnard’s birth, life and death. Impressionism celebrates its 150th anniversary. We’re approaching the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And of course, the Olympics await. The Phillips Collection makes a welcome addition to the list with this look at Bonnard and the way his paintbrush feasted on France. This marks the first major retrospective of Bonnard’s work at the museum in two decades, and the exhibition delivers a compelling argument in favor of the talent of the often-overlooked member of the post-impressionist group of French painters known as the Nabis.

There’s an intimacy and emotional depth to the display choices, as museumgoers explore the way Bonnard depicted the places that shaped and moved him, from the interior spaces of his home to the larger expanses of Paris, Normandy and the south of France. The light dazzles, the colors overwhelm.

“I think it’s exciting, especially when you take an artist like Bonnard in whose work there are threads you can weave across the whole career,” said Smithgall. “It’s a fresh, new way to take in the work.”

It’s an immersive exhibition, full of vivid colors and luminous canvases. The show sets the stage for viewers early, with this quote from Bonnard plastered on the wall in massive print: “I have all my subjects at hand. I go see them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before painting, I think, I dream.”

Bonnard’s Worlds is a massive exhibition and covers extensive ground. The lack of chronology propels the show and gives it genuine dynamism. Rather than feeling forced or haphazard, it’s an enlightening way to experience this artist and his work.

Co-organized by the Phillips Collection and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the exhibition also spotlights the D.C. gallery’s own connection with the artist. The museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, was an early believer in the artist, and the first painting he acquired from Bonnard in 1925 (“Woman with Dog”) is on view. Bonnard even visited D.C. in 1926, and the museum now holds one of the largest collections of his work in a museum outside of France.

‘Colors merge like waves’

In several of the rooms in the show, the home is the setting and intimacy is the focus. As visitors travel through the interior — seeing everything from what foods and flowers were on his table to how he pictured his longtime partner Marthe at her toilette — colors merge like waves and saturate everything.

Any review of Bonnard can’t go on too long without highlighting his fascination with animals. Cats and dogs feature across his works, with jaunty and odd little faces. The show notes that he and Marthe had six dachshunds, all named Poucette, or Thumbelina. And it’s always a fun game to find the cats hidden in his paintings – and pick your favorite.

In his work, people are depicted a bit strangely, his cats are cute but off-kilter, but his worlds are always suffused with unmatched light. The exhibition travels outside the home, taking in the world from a window, then out on the terrace, then into the garden itself before entering the broad wilds of a landscape. Bonnard does things with oil that seem like pastel work, and there’s rich beauty and fascinating detail across the paintings on display as you’re taken from settings of intimacy to expanse.

In one image you’re on a balcony, looking out into a world of green life and vibrant color. A dog peers out of a French window. In another you’re fully immersed in a sea of color, gardeners at work under a purple and golden sky.

Time and again, Bonnard breaks the rules of and re-imagines landscape painting by making everything feel like a landscape painting, even the intimate moments of life or the simplicity of glancing out a window.

Visitors are given the opportunity in this exhibition to take the point of view of Bonnard, traversing the viewpoints of his life and exploring them over a lifetime of work. As I overheard one visitor say while I was wandering the rooms: “These landscapes are delicious.”

The inspiration of the impressionists is also on display in “Early Spring” from 1908, but so too is the challenge he had to take things further and, as he said, “outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of color.” This is Bonnard’s world, the exhibition declares, and museumgoers take his vantage point throughout, seeing the world through his eyes, but out of time, out of sequence.

‘Mysterious and alluring’

Matisse praised one painting on display, “Basket of Fruit” from 1946, as “so mysterious and alluring.” That’s a good way to describe the exhibition itself, which is a feast of color and light. Throughout the works in the exhibition, there’s pink bodies, purple sunlight and yellow everywhere. People seem to explode out of the greenery in his “Twilight (The Game of Croquet)” from 1892, their geometric outfits popping out of the deep and different greens. Three shoots of golden light emerge from the background, and women in the corner are blurred visions of white dresses springing out of the flattened image.

With Bonnard, even if it’s a domestic scene, there’s a push to capture something wild, whether it’s in the lushness of plants on a kitchen table, the strange, alien face of a pet, or the unexpected sight of people living within purple, incandescent bodies. This exhibition is a showcase of color at its maximum intensity, and a welcome invitation to understand a singular artist and the France he knew.

Bonnard’s Worlds is at the Phillips Collection through June 2, 2024.