Forever Nude Book

The story – beautifully-written and acutely observed – of the painter Bonnard and his relationship with his model Marthe – later his wife.

Stepping from the pavement onto the Boulevard Hausmann on that December morning in 1893, she was Marie, a farmer’s daughter from the Midi. Rescued from the tumult and the commotion of horses and carriages, she was escorted to the far side of the avenue by a diffident young artist named Pierre Bonnard. When at last they spoke, she introduced herself as Marthe de Máligny, aristocratic daughter of Italian parents. It was as Marthe that she would, for fifty years, be Bonnard’s lover and his muse, she could come to define his very palette.

There are no nudes in Bonnard’s work before Marthe. Afterwards, her body, perched naked above a mirror of water, at her toilette, or in the languor after lovemaking would dominate his work. In a hundred and fifty paintings and more than seven hundred sketches, Pierre Bonnard would chronicle light falling onto Marthe, by happy chance, forever nude. It would be almost forty years, on the eve of their marriage, before Bonnard discovered that Marthe was Marie.

In impressionistic, jewel-like sketches, poet and novelist Guy Goffette conjures the artist and his model; the radiant colours, the sensual shapes and forms of Bonnard’s genius. Forever Nude is an homage, a love letter, an impassioned record of the artist who wanted only to present himself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly his own maxim: Art will never be able to exist without nature.


From the Hardcover edition.