Émile Bernard
Stories behind the Works of Art
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The First Painting of Synthetism?
Le Pardon or Les Bretonnes dans la Prairie (Breton Women in the Meadow), (1888). Émile Bernard
In Pont-Aven, the Breton village where the Parisian artists with a low budget spent the summers painting, Paul Gauguin and the young Émile Bernard worked together and generated a revolution, which had a decisive influence on many of the movements of the first decades of modernity. It was called Synthetism.
After attending a local religious party, Le Pardon party, Bernard started to paint this work.
At the same time Gauguin was painting his famous Vision after the Sermon.
Although both artists worked very close and shared concerns and generated this novelty, they later had problems in the recognition of ideas: basically, Gauguin did not give Bernard the credit Bernard thought he deserved. In fact Gauguin had such an influence on new generations and so many artists followed him or took his advice that Bernard was overshadowed.
Gauguin is the first artist that comes to our mind when we think of Synthetism. But Bernard was already working on the Cloisonnist technique (using color by zones limited by a dark edge, like in the stained glass windows or the Japanese woodblock prints) with another painter, Louis Anquetin.
The most important thing about Synthetism is that does not faithfully imitate nature. There is a simplification of forms, perspective is not taken into account, the line becomes “purer” and colors are used by the artists to express how they feel, the emotions they have when painting. Color has meaning.
Synthetism looked for the greatest expressive strength possible, and that is why it had a decisive influence on new modern generations, whose spirit was Expressionist: art no longer took into account the external world of the artist, but the inner one.
The initial enthusiasm was such (when there was no distrust between Gauguin and Bernard) that that same year Gauguin went to Arlés to Van Gogh’s home and took this painting to Vincent so he could appreciate how far they have reached with the new ideas.
Van Gogh, who painted versions of the works of artists who amazed him — he called them translations— painted his own version of this work and called it Breton Women (1888), to tell his brother Theo how impressed he was by the work of the young Bernard.
As from that moment, Van Gogh started to use the Cloisonnist technique.
Recommended links:
When Will You Marry? (1892), Paul Gauguin.
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting: Mont Saint-Victoire, Paul Cézanne.
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso.
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