Art: Bonanza Split

France’s decision last week to build a monumental new “Museum of the 20th Century” gives sweet vindication to two great artists. One is Swiss-born Le Corbusier (TIME cover, May 5, 1961), who has worked in Paris for 39 years and has never received a major commission in his adopted city. He will design the building, doing everything, as usual, right down to the doorknobs. The other is the late Georges Rouault, who once outraged France by burning 315 of his own paintings. The new museum will devote ten of its galleries to Rouault, including 1,000 oils, watercolors, drawings and engravings almost unknown to the public.

Since Rouault’s death in 1958, this work has lain in his studio near the Gare de Lyon, a big apartment whose address he kept secret to avoid visitors. He always hoped that his thick, glowing paintings would eventually be shown in some place that, unlike France’s many one-man museums, would be widely known and easily accessible. This was also the dream of his daughter (“my little dove”) Isabelle, who has devoted her life to her father’s work. A few weeks ago Minister of Culture André Malraux told her of the museum plan and Rouault’s big place in it. Isabelle got her mother, brother, sisters, nieces and nephews to agree to the gift, biggest ever made to a state by the heirs of an artist.

The pictures are all unsigned, which means that Rouault considered them unfinished. It was over this point that Rouault in 1947 made legal history in France by winning a suit against the heirs of his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, for the return of hundreds of canvases that Rouault claimed were still his property because he never signed them. The court ruled in the artist’s favor, declaring that any creator could decide when a creation was finished or not. The next year, to prove that there was no material motive in his fight, Rouault, 77 at the time, burned all the work that he thought he would never be able to finish.