© Whitney Bedford
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Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Mid Morning) Triptych
2022
Not on view
Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Mid Morning) Triptych is part of a series of mixed-media paintings by Whitney Bedford reinterpreting canonical landscapes by artists such as Pierre Bonnard, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, or Félix Vallotton. Admiring Bonnard in particular “as a precursor to digital-image culture in the way he encodes the environment around him,” Bedford has repeatedly turned to his work as a source of inspiration.
Through a process that includes digitization, projection, drawing, and masking, Bedford created a recognizable yet schematized rendition of Bonnard’s 1911 triptych On the Mediterranean (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia). The work takes the form of a three-dimensional vista seen from an interior demarcated by dark floors, glass windows, and pink (artificial?) trees. The insertion of the trapezoid black plane in the foreground creates a perspective absent from the original image, which puts the Bonnardian scene at both a spatial and temporal remove.Â
Popular among travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, veduta (view) paintings served as reminders of places visited or yet to be “conquered.” By invoking the tradition of vedute in her revisioning of nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscapes, Bedford emphasizes the continuity of Western civilization’s consumptive relationship to nature, which has led to the current climate crisis. In her series, the latter creeps into the picture in the form of stark interior spaces, neon trees, and the redacted information of the source painting. Bedford likes to think of her works as a collaboration with the artists she cites; a shared reflection on the environmental toll of the Anthropocene.Â
- Artist
- Whitney Bedford
- Title
- Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Mid Morning) Triptych
- Date
- 2022
- Place of Creation
- Los Angeles
- Object Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Ink and oil on linen on panel
- Dimensions
- Overall: 114 x 180 in. (289.561 x 457.201 cm) Overall (each panel): 114 x 60 in. (289.561 x 152.4 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Gift of Rebecca Reeve Henderson
- Accession Number
- 2024.42a-c
