BonnardM
In France, where even amateurs of painting enjoy a bit of rhetoric, for two or three days after the death of Renoir one could not be long in any of their haunts without being told either that “Renoir est mort et Matisse est le plus grand peintre de France” or that “Renoir est mort et Derain,” etc. Also, so cosmopolitan is Paris, there were those who would put in the query: “Et Picasso?” but, as no Frenchman much cares to be reminded that the man who, since Cézanne, has had the greatest effect on painting is a Spaniard, this interjection was generally ill-received. On the other hand, those who queried: “Et Bonnard?” got a sympathetic hearing always.
M. Léon Werth deals neither in rhetoric nor in orders of merit. Bonnard is his theme; and on Bonnard he has written thirty-six pages without, I think, pronouncing the name of one rival, leaving to his readers the agreeable task of putting the right heads in the way of such blows as he occasionally lets fly. Of Bonnard he has written with a delicacy of understanding hardly to be matched in contemporary criticism. He has sketched exquisitely a temperament, and if he has not told us much about its fruits, about the pictures of Bonnard that is to say, he can always refer us to the series of reproductions at the end of the volume.
Notes
M Bonnard. Par Léon Werth. Paris: Crès. 40 fr.