Word: bonnard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WHEN Rockefeller turns a profit, he gives most of it to some 200 charities. But he likes to live well. He collects paintings (about 100 by Gainsborough, Bonnard, Vlaminck, etc.), houses (a Fifth Avenue duplex, an estate on the Hudson, a 15-room summer home on Fishers Island-a millionaire's retreat 135 miles from New York), cars (a Bentley, a Cadillac, four others). He loves speed, often commutes in his fast 65-ft. aluminum P-T boat to his office in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center (of which he is chairman). He enjoys muscle-straining outdoor exercise...
...generally takes swagger to get quick glory, even in art, and Bonnard had none. Born bourgeois in 1867, Bonnard studied law to please his father, and art to please himself. Gauguin inspired him to switch permanently to painting. He found a model named Marthe who suited him, and bundled her south to the Midi. They finally set up housekeeping in a little villa at Le Cannet overlooking terraced olive and almond groves with the Mediterranean beyond. Sea, fruit, sunshine, the glow of Marthe's flesh, the dark contrasting sheen of their dachshund, flowers, the trees and the soft airs...
When strangers sought him at the villa, Bonnard would pad out to meet them at the garden gate, blandly regret that "M. Bonnard is out." Back in the house he tacked huge canvases to the wall and dabbed at them with colors arranged on a china plate. Achieving something that suited him, he would snip it out and ship it to his dealers. Connoisseurs began buying Bonnards at modest prices; living simply, he had no money worries. His chosen life remained much the same until his death twelve years ago at 79, when he left a studio full of pictures...
Nature was Bonnard's intimate tutor, but no vain one; he never held a mirror up to her. What he strove for and kept reaching for was the evanescent sense of revelation in nature-tremulous and transient as a rainbow...
Such moments can be glorious, and Bonnard's art was to seize and fix them for all time. His Piazza del Popolo has the quality of a good dream about to vanish. The Terrace shimmers, billowing like a veil before the onrush of huge forces. And finally Early Spring, which seems so gentle at first, is heaving, budding, bursting, beckoning, filled with wet splendors and bright pangs of delight...