EMILE HENRI BERNARD

 

Post –220 by Gautam Shah

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

Emile Henri Bernard was born in Lille, France (1868-). He began his studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 1884, but after being suspended for expressive tendencies in his art, he joined the Atelier Cormon. Atelier Cormon offered him a chance to experiment with Impressionism and Pointillism.

Bernard developed many theories about his artwork, and what he wanted, it to be. He believed ‘art would be of the most extreme simplicity and that would be accessible to all’. Bernard was also a poet and a writer, who studied religious mysticism and philosophy.

Bernard was one of the youngest, and most innovative artists to work alongside Paul Gauguin. He is known for art style called Cloisonnism, the term, was coined by the critic Edouard Dujardin.

Cloisonnism is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. These compositions typically featured distorted forms and areas of shadow-less, unnatural colours, each bounded by heavy outlines, reminiscent of medieval stained glass or cloisonne enamels. His works were inspired from the medieval stained-glass windows. The main intention was to ‘express an inner world of emotion, rather than exterior objective reality’.

● “The first means that I use is to simplify nature to an extreme point. I, reduce the lines, only to the main contrasts, and I reduce the colours to the seven fundamental colours of the prism.”

● "everything that is superfluous in a spectacle is covering it with reality and occupying our eyes instead of our mind. You have to simplify the spectacle in order to make some sense of it. You have, in a way, to draw its plan”.

Bernard worked closely with Gauguin to produce the broader style known as Syntheism. Here the forms and colour schemes, are 'synthesized' with the artist's vision of the painting, to produce a ‘startling work of art’.

Other colleagues at Pont-Aven, associated with Cloisonnism and Syntheism, were Paul Serusier, Jacob Meyer de Haan, Charles Laval, Charles Filiger, and Armand Seguin. During 1887-88, Bernard worked in Paris with Anquetin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec (the trio were dubbed the School of Petit-Boulevard). 

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