Bernard sets out on a lonely path
This is Émile Bernard chipping his name into the granite of 20th-century art history, a lovely painting by any measure, “Le Repos a Pont-Aven”, which also shares the title “Le Gardeuse d’Oies”. Here the guardian of the geese is a Breton lass recalled from his hike around Normandy, possibly Émile’s sister Madeleine.
The Grimms’ tale of a lost princess destined to mind geese and pine for her royal fiance, “The Goose Girl” had been delightening readers since 1815, though here, eight decades later — and in Camille Pissarro’s slightly earlier etching, seen below — I can’t help thinking that Leda and her swan aren’t making discreet appearances. See this post.
The main title of Bernard’s version is intriguing. Much has been made of his bravery in breaking with Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School and going “beyond modernity and present-day reality”, as he put it, in pursuit of the stark post-impressionist vista that’s known rather weightily as pictorial symbolism. “What I wanted to do was create a style for our age,” he wrote.
In fact, what didn’t become abstract became merely decorative.
Was Bernard putting Pont-Aven “at rest”, or was he putting it “to rest”? Without an answer, I fail to see any bravery in his retrograde reclamation of the Renaissance and the classics, and I wonder if the lack of clear inspiration in this painting had anything to do with the fact that it raised “only” $301,000 at Sotheby’s New York on May 8 when the seller was hoping for between $400,000 and $600,000.
(Sotheby’s by the way, acknowledged cracking in the black of the goose girl’s dress and on the picture’s edges, but said nothing about the yellow splotches in this image from its website. Perhaps they’re a photographic anomaly.)
Similarly, Pissarro — abandoning Seurat’s pointillism because the required scientific calculus robbed him of spontaneity — sought something fresh, but there are few clues in his sketch as to where he was headed, apart from tragic blindness.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Portrait of Émile Bernard”, 1886
Émile Bernard (1868-1941), having dallied with Gauguin at Pont-Aven in 1888 and given Van Gogh a few pointers, before those two shacked up together in Arles with Bernard’s “Breton Women in the Meadow” beaming its influence from the wall, became more and more academic as time went on.
There was a lot of that going on — casting backward to the very old masters — as recent Dali House posts on Derain and Seurat showed. Bernard reached even further: “I needed to go back to the primitives.”
There was the July 1889 l’Exposition des peintures du Groupe impressionniste et synthétiste at the Cafe Volpini, with Gauguin, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Léon Fauche, Georges Daniel de Monfried, Paul Serusier, Louis Roy, Emile Schuffenecker and Roderic O’Conor. But by 1891 Bernard had moved on from the work that had so inspired Van Gogh and Gauguin and linked up with the symbolists — Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Hodler and the rest.
The structures of the older world beckoned loudly enough that in 1893 Bernard set off for Egypt. He came home from Spain and Italy so full of notions that his own style was as lost as the sad little royal gooseherd. Forty more years remained to him, to paint and write and teach, but he never again found the rest he’d enjoyed at Pont-Aven.
