"Vermillion in the orange shadows, on a cold, fine day," Pierre Bonnard wrote in a sketchbook on one of his daily walks near his home, at Le Cannet, north of Cannes. Born in 1867 in a suburb of Paris, he settled in the South of France in 1926 with his reclusive wife, Marthe, remaining until his death in 1947. Such atmospheric observations infused the paintings that dominated the artist’s last three decades: window-framed landscapes and radiant domestic scenes depicting his wife going about her day. "The late interiors give you an understanding of how truly modernist he was," says Dita Amory, a curator with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who has organized the first exhibition devoted to these works, opening January 27. "Shadow is never gray or black. It’s violet or purple."

Bonnard made his mark early as part of the Nabis ("prophets" in Hebrew), the self-named group, including Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier, that met at the Académie Julian, in Paris, in the late 1880s and experimented with suppressing perspective by using decorative pattern and flat areas of color. In the first decade of the 20th century, Bonnard struck out on his own. Dividing his time between the city and the country, he painted active street scenes in Paris and worked with professional models. By 1912 — when he bought a small house in Vernonnet, near Giverny, and his life with Marthe became more secluded — he had forged a distinctive technique, using oppositional hues that vibrated across his spatial fields.

"Bonnard is radically important to our understanding of the 20th century, and he’s one of only a handful of artists — including Picasso — who were able to almost reinvent themselves throughout their careers," says Guy Bennett, the head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s. "Undeservingly, he hasn’t been recognized in the market as someone of that importance, and I think the whole body of his work is undervalued."

The public’s perception of him is changing, however. To illustrate the shift, Bennett points to Bonnard’s auction record of $8.5 million, set at Christie’s New York in November 2006 — following a full-scale retrospective of his work staged the previous spring at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris — by his relatively small, 233/4-by-317/8-inch, late still life Deux corbeilles de fruits, 1935 (est. $5-7 million). "The painting captured those things that bridged the two ends of his career: the quality of flatness, or lack of perspective, and this great saturation of color. It’s exactly what the market was looking for," says Bennett. "If a significant late interior or nude were to come to auction, it would shatter the present world record."

Bonnard was a prolific artist and an indefatigable draftsman, producing gouaches, watercolors and pastels. He made close to 400 paintings of his wife alone, comprising large-scale nudes in which Marthe, shown in the midst of an obsessive bathing routine likely prescribed for her numerous ailments, is the focal point, as well as interiors featuring her, nearly camouflaged in brilliant light, at the periphery of a beautifully laid table.

The artist’s monumental canvases reside in both public and private hands and seldom surface on the market. The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., for instance, owns 17 oil paintings by Bonnard, whose art the museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, started collecting in depth in the 1920s. And some 50 works acquired by Bonnard’s friends Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser are in Switzerland with their descendants, who have lent one of their pieces to the Metropolitan show. Other lenders include the French collectors Sylvie Baltazart-Eon and Anisabelle Berès-Montanari and the American collectors Pilar and Stephen Robert and Henry Silverman.

The last time a really major example of a woman in an interior came on the block, according to Emmanuel Di-Donna, the vice chairman of Impressionist and modern at Sotheby’s, was more than two decades ago, in 1988, when the oil Après le repas, 1925 (est. $2.5-3.5 million), sold at Christie’s New York for $7.5 million — the artist’s auction record for the next 18 years. In 1989, at Christie’s London, Après le bain, a large undated watercolor and gouache nude, fetched £352,000 ($546,668), more than doubling its high estimate of £150,000 ($273,300). Twenty years later, the piece still holds Bonnard’s auction record for a work on paper.

"There has not been a great Bonnard on the market in recent years, but there have been good paintings," says Di-Donna, citing the 2003 sale at Sotheby’s London of La Porte fenêtre, 1932, portraying Marthe sewing near a window, for just over £4,261,600 ($7 million) against a £3 million estimate. "If a picture like that came back up, it would [bring] in excess of $10 million today." La Porte fenêtre, which went to a private collector, is included in the Metropolitan show.

Guy Wildenstein, a principal dealer in Bonnard through his New York gallery Wildenstein & Company, concurs that it is becoming harder and harder to find the artist’s strongest pieces. Among these, the Nabis works and the great coloristic achievements of the last three decades of his life, Wildenstein states, tend to have the greatest appeal and fetch the highest prices. "Were the Musée d’Orsay’s La Partie de croquet, 1892, to be available today," he says, "or La Salle à manger à la campagne, 1913, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, or one of the great pictures in the Phillips Collection, each would undoubtedly sell for a price in excess of $25 million."

According to Wildenstein, sums realized for Bonnards in recent private sales have been on a par with those achieved by Matisse, a close friend of the artist’s who has been paired with him over the past two years in several museum shows at venues such as the Jardin du Tivoli, in France, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in Rome. Bonnard’s auction prices, in contrast, have yet to catch up with those of Matisse, whose current record is $33.6 million, set at Christie’s in 2007 for his L’Odalisque, harmonie bleue, 1937.

Wildenstein’s observation about Bonnard’s Nabis works is echoed by Di-Donna, who says this period used to be regarded as the artist’s most important, art historically, and by Izabela Grocholski, of the Jan Krugier Gallery, in New York, who has found these pictures to be the most sought after by collectors. Bennett points out, however, that because they tend to be small, the Nabis paintings typically fetch just under $1 million. The works that break through this ceiling are relatively large. Bennett cites, for example, the 15-by-18-inch 1891 study L’Après-midi au jardin, which sold for $2.5 million in 2007 at Christie’s. La Partie de croquet, the Nabis masterpiece that Wildenstein surmised could bring upwards of $25 million, is exceptional in scale, conceived as a screen in four sections and measuring 51 by 64 inches.

Following his Nabis period, the painter began incorporating some of the naturalism of the Impressionists, says Amory, who points out that he had always been ill suited to painting from life, as most Impressionists did. Wildenstein feels that, despite their transitional character, Bonnard’s pictures from "between 1900 and 1910" are "still somewhat underappreciated." An exception, the dealer notes, is the sensational Paris cityscape Place Clichy, 1906-07, which earned $7.7 million, Bonnard’s second-highest auction price, in 2006 at Sotheby’s.

After moving to the country, in 1912, Bonnard made a habit of tacking his canvases to the wall, so he wouldn’t be distracted by anything in his field of vision. He painted what he knew most intimately — his home and wife — from his imagination and from his notebook sketches, which now sell for $6,000 and up, according to the New York dealer Jill Newhouse. "They’re really mini grisaille paintings," says Newhouse. "To get something for that price by an artist who we’re all acknowledging now is as great as Matisse is a very good value."

Amory observes that Bonnard would continually add and subtract around the edges of his works elements that were often ambiguous and underscored the flux of life. Such extemporaneous framing, adroitly employed in the later paintings, might resonate with today’s aesthetic, but the critics of 1947, when Bonnard died, were dismissive. "He was considered an Impressionist has-been," says Amory. This attitude didn’t fundamentally shift until 1984, with the French art historian Jean Clair’s groundbreaking Bonnard retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This was followed over the next two decades by several similarly enlightening exhibitions, such as PaceWildenstein’s 1997 "Bonnard/Rothko: Color and Light," which explored Bonnard’s influence on the Abstract Expressionists; the Museum of Modern Art’s 1998 retrospective; and the 2006 Musée d’Art Moderne show mentioned above. After viewing the last, the New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman — who poetically considers Bonnard’s career in his book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa — wrote, "Beneath his sunny pictures of his wife and his garden, of summer fruit and paradisiacal landscapes, Bonnard had a Proustian relationship to memory and an equally complex syntax of perception."

Wildenstein believes that the current show at the Metropolitan Museum will further validate just how revolutionary the late canvases were. "Bonnard was every bit as creative and much bolder in his experimentation with light and color at the end of his life than in earlier periods," says the dealer. "In that respect, he was the equal of his contemporaries Matisse and Picasso." "Pierre Bonnard" originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2009 Table of Contents.