Émile Bernard was an innovative painter and an influential art theorist, but was never able to completely remove himself from the overpowering shadow of his friend Paul Gauguin. Experts nevertheless class the French artist as one of the founders of Symbolism who assisted in the birth of Modernism, and increasing efforts are being made to do justice to the forgotten master.
(...) Continue readingÉmile Bernard – Apprenticeship not without conflict
Émiile Bernard was born in Lille on 28 April 1868. The son of a textile manufacturer, he lived from the age of ten in Paris where he attended the Collège Sainte-Barbe and École des Arts Décoratifs. In 1884, he took tuition at the private painting school, Atelier Cormon, where he was taught by the history painter Fernand Cormon who tended towards academic realism. In Cormon’s studio, he made the impressionable acquaintances of Louis Anquetin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, before artistic differences with his tutor led to his premature exclusion from the school. Bernard continued to learn by himself and undertook a walking tour through Normandy and Brittany. During a stay in Concarneau, he met the Neo-Impressionist Émile Schuffenecker and received from him a letter of recommendation for the already established painter, Paul Gauguin, twenty years his senior. However, no collaboration emerged during Bernard’s first visit to Gauguin in Pont-Aven.
Friendship and break with Paul Gauguin
In the winter of 1886/87, Émile Bernard made the acquaintance of Vincent van Gogh which led to a close exchange of letters. In 1887, Bernard travelled a second time to Pont-Aven, and this time, the hoped-for cooperation with Gauguin came to fruition. Bernard excelled in the development of new painting methods and impressed his fellow painters with his innovative concepts. His extremely individualistic view of art, which had once brought him into conflict with his tutor Cormon, encouraged him to experiment in a variety of ways and enabled him to go beyond existing boundaries. From an initial interest in Pointillism followed his intense study of Japanese woodcut prints – in fashion at the time – from which he developed his simplified painting style with strongly delineated colour fields, which eventually led to Post-Impressionist Syntheticism and Cloisonnism in exchange with Gauguin and Anquetin and the founding of the Pont-Aven school. When Gauguin alone reaped the credit for this work, the result was a final break between the two headstrong artists – whose collaboration had never been free of tension anyway.
Significant correspondence with fellow artists
Émile Bernard suffered difficult years in his attempts to evade the impending military conscription. With the help of friendly doctors, he had himself certified of ill health time and again. In 1893, he fled to Italy, and thanks to the financial support of patrons such as Andries Bonger, found tolerable exile in the British protectorate of Egypt. Bernard eventually returned to France in 1904 where he became friends with Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence. The comprehensive correspondence between Bernard and Cézanne (as with van Gogh and Gauguin also), is one of the most important sources for the history of art of the late 19th century. Bernard’s writings also include novels, and his contemporaries such as the symbolist painter and co-founder of the Nabis, Maurice Denis, who also delivered Bernard’s eulogy, attested that he had the soul of a poet.
Émile Bernard died on 16 April 1941 in Paris.
Émile Bernard - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
