BENDALL, MILDRED (French/British, 1891-1977)

Bendall made her way to Paris in 1927, where she attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. It was here that she befriended Matisse and Marquet, whose Fauve paintings turned her eye to colour as means of expressing form. Under their influence Bendall gave up painting the traditional interior scenes she had learned to paint in the academic style at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, for a more free expression of the simpler subject of the still life. As a frequent visitor to Matisse’s home, she met his son Paul who proposed to her. After some hesitation, Bendall refused and returned to Bordeaux, to concentrate on her ‘new’ painting of form through colour.
Back in Bordeaux in 1928, Bendall founded the ‘Société des Artistes Indépendants’ and ‘Le Studio’, two movements which gathered young aspiring Bordelaise artists. In addition to her active involvement in promoting the avant-garde in Bordeaux, Bendall kept in touch with her Paris friends. In 1937 the Galerie de Paris, Faubourg St. Honoré exhibited twenty five flower paintings alongside work by Kees Van Dongen, Raoul Dufy and Max Jacob. Her success was confirmed with a purchase by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
It is in her work of the 1930s that Bendall finds her own individual style, carefully composing her flower pieces, landscapes and harbour scenes with a basic structural insight imposed on her unrivalled feeling for colour.


Public collections include:
Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris