Sarah Whitfield reviews the recent exhibition Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The show, Whitfield notes, addresses two issues: "Should Bonnard be seen primarily as an easel painter, as fully engaged in the twentieth century as Matisse or Picasso? In which case these decorations, dislodged from their original period settings, tend to muddle the story. Or should the artist be seen as a painter who began, and to some extent remained, a painter immersed in the Nabi pursuit of the ‘decorative’?"