Anne Bonnet

A co-founder of the Association de la Jeune Peinture Belge in 1945, Anne Bonnet is not as well known today as other members, such as her friends Gaston Bertrand and Louis Van Lint, although various initiatives are emerging to restore her reputation (an exhibition at the Musée Marthe Donas in 2022). During her lifetime, however, Bonnet exhibited all over the world, from the Venice and São Paulo Biennales to the second Documenta in Kassel. This Composition, undated but probably created between 1954 and 1958, is representative of the abstract style developed by the artist, who trained at the Academies of Brussels and Saint-Josse. In her early career, she painted intimate, realistic works in the animist tradition. After the Second World War, and alongside other artists, Bonnet moved towards abstraction by simplifying and geometrising motifs observed in reality, following in the wake of early 20th-century Cubist experiments. The real-world reference sometimes disappears entirely, giving way to a free and wholly pictorial emergence of forms and colours. This is also the case in this Composition, where circles and irregular quadrilaterals are painted as if suspended, and interconnected by a nervous network of black lines. The lumpy, striated texture of the paint helps to give rhythm to the canvas, in a materialism then widely experimented with in painting. The artist also demonstrates her talents as a colourist, illuminating the dominant blue-green with complementary accents of bright red and sunny yellow. This combination of balance, dynamism and chromatic vibrancy is characteristic of Anne Bonnet’s works from this period, and has been compared to certain similar compositions by Paul Klee. 

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