Pierre Bonnard - La Revue Blanche - 1896 - Lithograph

Pierre BONNARD (Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1867 – Le Cannet, 1947)
La Revue blanche
1896
Lithograph
40x29 cm (sheet) / 50x40 cm (frame)
Signed in the middle left on the stone: “P Bonnard / 94” Inscriptions in the margin: “Imp. Edw. Ancourt. PARIS » bottom right and « Les Maîtres de l'Affiche PL 38 / Imprimerie Chaix / (Encres Lorilleux & Cie) » bottom left / Dry stamp of the Maîtres de l'Affiche at the bottom right of the sheet
Sold framed with mat / can be seen by appointment in Boulogne-Billancourt
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Published by Les Maîtres de l'Affiche in September 1896, this lithograph is the reproduction of the poster created by Pierre Bonnard in the autumn of 1894 for La  Revue blanche, an avant-garde literary publication close to the "nabis".
This group of artists formed in the autumn of 1888 around the Talisman by Paul Sérusier, a small wooden panel painted following the advice of Paul Gauguin, strove in the last decade of the 19th century to renew art, notably by adopting cloisonnism and flat colors.
For his poster, Bonnard depicts an elegant young woman distributing the magazine, accompanied by a street urchin serving as a crier, while a man with his back to him studies a wall covered with issues. By means of more or less deep blacks applied in flat areas, the one nicknamed the "Japanese Nabi" because of his taste for Japanese prints manages to create an illusion of perspective with a very graphic dynamism, reinforced by an original irregular typography perfectly integrated into the design and by the multiplication of the inscriptions "La revue blanche".