Autumn: The Fruit Pickers 1912

Pierre Bonnard made Autumn: The Fruit Pickers with oil on canvas, and when you look at it, it's like standing in a yellow dream. The canvas is a burst of ochre and white, built up with layered brushstrokes, a mosaic of color. I imagine Bonnard standing there, squinting in the sunlight, trying to capture the feeling of the air. The paint is worked wet into wet, those strokes are soft, blurring at the edges, like he’s chasing after something he can’t quite hold. You can almost feel his frustration, his pleasure, the sheer physicality of moving paint around. He’s one of those painters that other painters love, because he's clearly thinking about Titian and other painters that go way back, all those masters obsessed with light. But he's also doing something so personal, so odd. He's showing us that paintings are never really finished, they’re just abandoned. And when we look, we pick up where they left off. Isn't that great?