Review of Bonnard: En toute intimité at the Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France

13/01/17

Bonnard: En toute intimité

Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, France

26 November 2016 – 23 April 2017

With the title Bonnard: En toute intimité, one might well expect an exhibition focusing on the artist’s nudes, or more erotic elements of his work, but, just as Tracey Emin’s tent, Everyone I Have Every Slept With 1963-1995, includes those with whom she simply enjoyed (or otherwise) the intimacy of a shared bed – or womb – so this beautifully curated show at the Musée Bonnard, in the artist’s ultimate hometown of Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur, looks at those people, places and things to which the artist was especially close at different points throughout his life. Arranged largely chronologically, it comprises about 60 works from the museum’s collection, alongside a handful of loans, and a number of new acquisitions from the Musée d’Orsay.

Read the rest of this review here

Image:

Pierre Bonnard

Paysage, soleil couchant (Landscape at sunset), c1923. 

Oil on canvas, 59 x 72.5 cm. 

Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, gift from the Fondation Meyer pour le développement culturel et artistique, permanent loan from the musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

© Adagp, Paris 2016. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

Display: Every Breath We Drew by Jess T Dugan

22/01/16
Every Breath We Drew by Jess T Dugan

Jess T Dugan began making this series of photographs in 2011 after she moved from Boston to Chicago to begin graduate school. Finding herself alone in a new, big city, she stopped making work solely about gender and identity and moved to looking at intimacy and connection. Indirectly, however, this brought her back to exploring her own identity and how it is reflected through her relationships with others.

“I repeatedly found myself drawn to people who embodied a gentle kind of masculinity,” she explains, “whether they were men or women, gay or straight, because they represented something I either saw in myself or wanted to embody.”

The resulting book is a collection of beautiful and sensitive images, portraying subjects of all genders, who, in their chosen expression, perform a more typically masculine role. It also contains a number of self-portraits. “I was trying to figure out who I was in relation to other people and who I could connect with in a meaningful and profound way.”

Dugan’s photographs offer encounters – and moments of intimacy – with a range of strangers. They also invite us to look inwards. Essentially, this is a book about developing that most important and intimate bond there can be: with oneself.

Every Breath We Drew

Photographs by Jess T Dugan

Daylight Books

£32.43

See the full feature in the February 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine