This week in La Gazette Drouot: At the café with Pierre Bonnard, the color revolution

Pierre Bonnard's boldness explodes in this Au café, painted around 1901, where space is reduced to a flat surface, in defiance of traditional perspective. For some time now, the artist had been experimenting with the principle that it is possible "to express all things without the need for relief or modeling".  

The boldness of his palette, too: so many reds, blacks and taupes draw their light from the bright white additions of the tablecloths and other dots scattered here and there, echoing his words: "It occurred to me that it was possible to translate light, shapes and characters with color alone, without resorting to values."
 

It was only ten years earlier, in 1891, that this brilliant pupil of the Lycée Charlemagne definitively renounced a ready-made legal career to devote himself exclusively to painting, exhibiting for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants and sharing a studio with his friends Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard. 

Félix Fénéon gave him the nickname "nabi très japonard" for his taste in Japanese prints. The adventure was short-lived. The protean group, made up of very different personalities - Denis was driven by great faith, while Vuillard and Bonnard opted for the muted life of interiors and claimed decorative painting - broke up in 1900, each taking a different direction.