Bonnard’s Worlds

Experience the light and color of France.

In Bonnard’s Worlds, the Kimbell Art Museum presents its first exhibition dedicated to the works of French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), inspired by its 2018 acquisition of the artist’s Landscape at Le Cannet (1928). As an artist, Bonnard found inspiration in the natural spaces, intimate interiors, and people that surrounded him in his homes and on his travels through Paris, Normandy, and the French Riviera. Through his paintings—glowing with intense colors and flooded with light—he invites us all into the most fascinating corners of these worlds.

The first major exhibition of Bonnard’s paintings in Texas in nearly forty years, Bonnard’s Worlds explores the sensory realms of experience that fueled the painter’s creative practice—from the most public spaces to the most private. Reuniting seventy of Bonnard’s finest paintings, created over the course of his career, the exhibition includes some of the artist’s most celebrated works from museums in Europe and the United States as well as many that are unfamiliar to the public from private collections around the world. Governed neither by chronology nor geography, but by measures of intimacy, the exhibition transports visitors from the larger realms in which Bonnard lived to the most private interior spaces of his dwellings and of his thoughts.