Word: bonnards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...MOUSY, stoop-shouldered little genius in steel-rimmed spectacles, Pierre Bonnard has sometimes appeared thin and small against the sunset immensity of his impressionist forerunners. But this week a sparkling retrospective exhibition at Washington's Phillips Gallery made plain that Bonnard did not follow the impressionists so much as fulfill them. Bonnard's art is impressionism freed from dazzle, pomp and optical theory for the service of feeling alone...
...fact, the heirs of impressionism deserve a better label than postimpressionism, with its overtone of depreciation. The greatest postimpressionist, Cézanne, turned the brilliant palette of impressionism into a kind of three-dimensional mosaic, a building material from which he built a new illusion of space. Bonnard, the other branch of the fork, transformed the same palette into poetry, spontaneous as breathing, modest and insidious as a dream...
...decided to act. In his small studio he took out a sheet of his fine drawing paper, wrote: "I name Pierre Bonnard my sole legatee," and signed it with the name of Maria Boursin. But he was so inept a scoundrel that he dated the will on the day he wrote it-ten months after Marthe's death. When Bonnard himself died in 1947, the obvious fakery of the will threw everything into confusion. Bonnard's direct heirs found themselves challenged for a half share in the estate by four nieces of his wife Marthe. The works that...
Cultural Clamor. For ten years the case dragged through the courts. A Paris tribunal held that Bonnard had committed a crime in writing Marthe's will; he was posthumously declared a forger, thief and receiver of stolen goods. A higher court argued that Bonnard could not have been a receiver of his own paintings, had faked the will only to facilitate matters. The even higher Court of Cassation set aside this decision and reaffirmed the basic law, ruling that an artist's work-unless he draws up a special marriage contract-belongs also to his wife...
...studio and denied him access to a painting he was still working on. As sometimes happens in France, popular feeling outweighed the rigidities of law. Last week a court of appeal in Orleans reversed the decision of the Court of Cassation, handed down a final verdict awarding Bonnard's property to his own heirs...