Émile Bernard
French, 1868-1941

Women Walking on the Banks of the Aven, 1890
oil on canvas
28 x 36 ¼ in.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Mr. and Mrs. Raymond H. Goodrich, by exchange to the MFAH



Bernard - Self-Portrait with Portrait of Gauguin, ca.1888

“The idea of making a kind of freemasonry of painters doesn’t please me very much; I deeply despise rules, institutions, etc., in short, I’m looking for something other than dogmas, which, very far from settling things, only cause endless disputes. They’re a sign of decadence. Now, as a union of painters exists so far only in the form of a vague but very broad sketch, then let’s calmly allow what must happen to happen.” – Letter to Bernard, 3 October 1888

COMMENTS

Emile Bernard is one of the most colorful personalities of early modern painting. Bernard was born on April 28, 1868 in Lille. Soon he met painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, made friends with Paul Gauguin and caused a stir among fellow painters with his pictures. After his first pointillist experiments Emile Bernard developed his own new pictorial idiom, which was later called Cloisonnism. In contrast to the delimitation of the impressionists, Emile Bernard clearly framed his subjects and colors with dark contours. This approach to pictures evoked interest from both van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, in 1888 and 1889 Emile Bernard and Gauguin worked closely together, though not without conflict. After van Gogh's death and the public's focus on Paul Gauguin as the founder of Symbolism, a confrontation arose between the former friends. Emile Bernard felt deceived. At the same time, he was at risk of being drafted into the military, so Emile Bernard fled to Egypt in 1893, where he lived for over 10 years and got married. Emile Bernard died in his Paris studio on April 16, 1941, aged 89.

https://www.paintingmania.com/woman-walking-banks-aven-56_28992.html


When Bernard returned from his summer trip to Brittany in July [1887], the world of vanguard art had a new venue: Goupil’s branch on the boulevard Montmartre, with Theo van Gogh as its manager. Bernard soon made his way to the Van Gogh brothers’ apartment on the rue Lepic, where he immediately recognized the long-neglected Vincent as a promising route to Theo’s favor. Within weeks, he invited Vincent to visit him at his parents’ new home in Asniéres, and the small wooden studio that had been built for Bernard on the grounds.

In this plank-sided clubhouse, the friendless thirty-four-year-old Van Gogh fell immediately under the spell of the charming nineteen-year-old. They exchanged enthusiasms and perhaps canvases. They may have painted together on the nearby banks of the Seine in the waning days of summer. Van Gogh treated Bernard with the same mix of solicitude and superciliousness, fraternal solidarity and tyrannical viscosity, that characterized all of his relationships. He rushed headlong into yet another cordial or convenient alliance mistaken for a deep friendship and destined to flame out in a long, lopsided correspondence.

But Bernard nevertheless introduced Van Gogh, in both words and images, to a radically new direction in art. Intent on being a leader, not a follower, Bernard advocated an imagery that would overturn Impressionism, not merely “renew” it. Beginning in 1887, he developed a stylized art of flat planes of color and bold outlines arranged to maximum ornamental effect, and compositions reduced to the simplest possible geometries, that would be called Cloisonnism after the comparted medieval enamels that it resembled. It was an art that defied the canons of Impressionism in all its forms, indicting equally what he considered to be the feckless vagaries of the Impressionist Monet and the faux precision of the Neo-Impressionist Seurat. Both had failed in art’s greatest mission, Bernard argued: to penetrate to the essence of things. Instead, he believed, they had rendered reality as insubstantial and meaningless—an evanescent stage effect, not real at all.

These ideas belonged originally to Louis Anquetin, a fearless innovator; the imagery, to the reclusive Paul Cézanne. But Bernard advertised them to Van Gogh in the bold new language of the Symbolists. An image stripped of its temporal, scientific finery (Bernard called objective truth “an intruder in art”) and reduced to color and design possessed the same mysterious expressive power as pure sensation, he argued. Indeed, it was sensation. “What is the point of reproducing the thousand insignificant details that the eye perceives?” one critic said in support of the new rebellion against Pointillism. “One should grasp the essential characteristic and reproduce it—or, rather, produce it.”

Bernard brought with him into Van Gogh’s orbit not only Anquetin’s ideas, but Anquetin himself, along with a second colleague from Cormon’s: Lautrec. Although both lived relatively close to the Van Gogh brothers’ rue Lepic apartment, Vincent had seen neither of his former classmates except in passing since leaving the atelier the previous summer. Theo, on the other hand, had begun corresponding with Lautrec by the spring of that year, drawn to the artist’s vibrant, Degas-like glimpses of “modern” life, just as he was drawn to Pissarro’s Monet-like glimpses of rural France. In reconnoitering for his coming push into vanguard art, Theo found reassurance in Lautrec’s proven salability, and, no doubt, in his family credentials—just as Lautrec found reassurance in Goupil’s gilt-edged reputation. With the announcement of the new initiative that summer, the status-conscious Lautrec eagerly followed his young friend Bernard into the circle around “les fières” Van Gogh.

Other artists were drawn to them, but only Bernard bid for Theo’s favor by directly courting his strange and difficult brother. The rest, like the students at the Antwerp Academy or Cormon’s studio, merely tolerated him, mostly out of deference to Theo. When they congregated at a café or at someone’s studio (Guillaumin’s and Lautrec’s were favorites), they seldom included him in their conversations. Van Gogh “arrived carrying a heavy canvas under his arm,” recalled a participant in one such gathering, “and waited for us to pay some attention to it. No one took notice.” In direct encounters, they scoffed at his naïve enthusiasms and chafed at his prickly self-righteousness, but feared his volatile temper. They rarely visited his studio and dreaded his visits to theirs.

- Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh and the Artists he Loved, New York: Random House, 2021, 268-270

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

By 1890, the year of Van Gogh’s premature death, Bernard had achieved a more delicate version of Cloissonnism (so named because of the flat areas of color, defined by dark contour lines, resembling stained-glass windows or cloisonné enamels), a stylized elegance that was completely his own. This painting corresponds perfectly to Van Gogh’s description of his young friend’s art: “He seeks to do modern figures as elegant as ancient Greeks or Egyptians. A grace in the expressive movements, a charm through daring colors.” After Van Gogh’s death, Bernard would go on to ally himself with the group of artists known as Symbolists, which included Odilon Redon and the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler, whose abstracted Alpine landscapes this painting resembles in its stylization.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022