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, Cézanne, turned the brilliant palette of...
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