Émile Henri Bernard was a French Post-Impressionist painter and writer, who had artistic friendships with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch, and at a later time, Paul Cézanne. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two late 19th-century art movements.
Background
Mr. Bernard was born in Lille, France, on April 28, 1868. He was the son of a merchant of tissues. Émile Bernard expressed a strong interest in the arts from a young age. That was the cause of the difficult relationship with his family, because he was expected to continue the family business.
Education
At the age of ten Émile Bernard moved to Paris with his family and, despite family opposition, enrolled in the school of decorative arts, Collège Sainte-Barbe. He continued his studies in drawing and painting in 1884 in Atelier Cormon Studio, at that time one of artistic schools more open to new Visual trends along with the Julien Academy. During his time at the Studio of Fernand Cormon, he became friends with Louis Anquetin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. During the winter of that year he also met Vincent Van Gogh in the Gallery of Julien-François Tanguy, where you could see works by Paul Cézanne.
During his stay in Cormon workshop, Mr. Bernard painted numerous views of Asnières, Paris suburb where they lived with their parents, in the line of Impressionist and pointillist innovations that dominated the artistic atmosphere of Paris in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Career
In 1885 Mr. Bernard traveled to Normandy and Britain and during a stay in Concarneau met the painter Claude-Émile Schuffenecker and subsequently in Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin. Although his friendship with Schuffenecker lasted the rest of their lives, Gaugin was more important for the development of his work relationship. In fact, between 1888 and 1891 he participated actively with the group from Pont-Aven, who settled in the village of Brittany around Gauguin, among whom were Laval, Anquetin, Sérusier, de Haan, de Chamaillard, King, Maufra and Willumsen, and practiced a style of art within the Post-Impressionist environment, whose stylistic and theoretical principles summarized under the name of cloisonnisme. The basic principle of this consisted of the partitioning of the pictorial surface in chromatic areas defined by thick stroke outlines and filled with pure colors.
Émile Bernard's broke with the naturalist realism and approximation to the symbolism, primitivist willingness and expressive violence in the use of color were the main characteristics of the movement formed around the figure of Gauguin. On 8 June 1889 he participated in the exhibition held in the Café Volpini, next to the Universal exhibition in Paris, entitled "Paintings of the Impressionist group and synthesist" which exhibited his work next to Augustin, Gauguin and Laval and Schuffnecker. Due to their frequent discussions with Gauguin and Anquetin about the paternity of the cloisonnism Mr. Bernard left the band in 1891, a year before its dissolution.
After an exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants of 1891, Émile Bernard spent the next year preparing the first anthological exhibition devoted to Vincent Van Gogh who had died in 1890. Following the conclusion of the show, he left Paris in 1893 and dedicated himself to travel: his first destination was Italy, then he sailed towards East and settled in Cairo. He then traveled to Spain (1896) and Venice (1901-1903). In 1904 he returned to the French capital, where he had exhibited individually in 1901. After his return the individual exhibitions were held both in France and abroad: in 1905 exhibited in the Gallery of the German art dealer Paul Cassirer (1871-1926), in Berlin and in 1908 at the Kunstverein Munich.
His contribution to the development of new plastic trends arising from post-impressionism is not only confined to his artistic production, his theoretical production acquired special importance especially after his encounter with Paul Cézanne. The correspondence between the two was so intense as important; proof of this was the letter in which Mr. Cézanne described the treatment of nature through elementary geometric shapes - cylinder, sphere and cone, which meant its manifesto theoretician of the French master. He collaborated in editing of the magazine La Rénovation Esthétique ('La renewal aesthetic'), whose first issue was published in 1905.
From the second decade of the 20th century and until his death, Mr. Bernard's work began to address issues of profound religious, something unpublished character on his previous production, inspired by the Italian Renaissance painting.
Quotations:
"A painter above all, he opens for art that surprising door: painting for its own sake."
"Art has been the battle of my whole life."
Connections
Mr. Bernard was married to Hanenah, a young Arab Christian girl. They were the parents of three sons, two of them suffered the illness and eventually died. His third son was called Antoine.