PAINTER OF THE RAINBOWS

A 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.

In fact, the heirs of impressionism deserve a better label than postimpressionism, with its overtone of depreciation. The greatest postimpressionist, Cezanne, 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.

It 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 were his joys and his chief materials.

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 valued at about $2,000,000 and hotly contested by his heirs (TIME. March 9).

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.

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