Le Blé noir (Buckwheat Harvesters at Pont Aven), Émile Bernard, 1888

Émile Bernard, Le Blé noir (Buckwheat Harvesters at Pont Aven), 1888, oil on canvas, Private Collection

I was reading Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House, an account of the nine weeks that Gauguin and Van Gogh spent together in Arles in 1888 when I came across the name of Émile Bernard (1868-1941). This vivid and highly engaging book contains multiple references to Bernard, testimony to the friendship that he maintained with both fellow artists and to the profound influence he had over the direction of post-impressionist art. He was twenty years younger than Gauguin at the time and fifteen younger than Van Gogh, and although clearly inexperienced and precocious, arguably his best work was done in that same pivotal year. There was something about Bernard’s ability both with his art and in the articulation of his vision through his letters, as Gayford highlights, to which both older artists responded enthusiastically and admiringly.

The son of a bourgeois cloth merchant, Bernard had enrolled at the Atelier Cormon art school against his parent’s wishes at age sixteen where he met a kindred radical, Toulouse Lautrec, but his resistance to the formal training regime there and his desire to explore more progressive artistic ideas than his tutors were ready for, led to his expulsion. Even from this brief biographical outline and from the tenor of his correspondence with his peers, we can detect in him an attitude that combines the confidence of relative privilege with a dissident intellectual curiosity and boldness – and an impatience both with the neoclassicism of traditional French art as well as with the Impressionists’ preoccupation with ‘mere’ natural light effects. Bernard by contrast, wanted art to explore the expressive potential of form, structure and symbolism, to evoke through exaggeration and distortion what he considered to have more serious meaning. This he achieved thanks to a gift for colour and figuration and a personality uncompromising in its iconoclasm. It’s this forward-thinking pursuit of a new aesthetic at the end of the nineteenth century, a period that anticipates Modernism and more advanced abstraction, that makes his work so interesting.

 As a young man, he made friendships easily (and was to fall out with some just as easily later in life, feeling hard done by and given insufficient credit for his achievements). At the Cormon school he had also met Louis Anquetin who he found to be particularly simpatico so that by 1887, the pair were collaborating on a new style, later to be termed Cloisonism,

Louis Anquetin, Avenue de Clichy – Five O’clock in the Evening, 1887. Oil on paper, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

a reference back to the artefactual Cloisonné technique of outlining areas by metal wires or bands and infilling them either with enamel or glass. The strong outlines used in the depiction of figures and other forms was deliberately unnaturalistic and evoked not only medieval stained glass but also the Japanese Ukiyo-e, highly stylised woodblock prints which were still all the rage in fin de siècle Paris and later recognised under the term Japonisme.

In Le Blé noir, Bernard clearly uses the same kind of black outline to his figures, a technique which not only delineates their shapes conspicuously, but also lends them a significance that humble field labourers would not usually enjoy in art. Aside from this however, the first thing that strikes the viewer is the use of extraordinary, hot colour. It is as if the men and women pictured are not harvesting crops but molten metal or an eruption of lava. There is an incandescence to the image which is at once warmly seductive but also intimidating in its too-hot-to-touch elemental energy. The brushstrokes are highly expressive too, the paint laid on thickly and assuredly, which heightens their intensity even further.

Inspired by his time spent in Pont-Aven in France’s far north-west, where he had embarked on a walking holiday with his mother and sister in 1888, the scene features the traditional field costumes of Breton workers as they gather and stand the sheaves of buckwheat on end to dry in the end-of summer heat. The articulation of their bodies as they bend to their work has clearly captivated the artist and he depicts them as if they are in religious supplication to nature; the women’s coiffe’s and black and white habit-like dress, making look like nuns, seems to reinforce this idea. The land’s fecundity seems to be worshipped as the sheaves are caressed into shape, almost erotically. At the same time, this is clearly shown to be back-breaking work, and faces have been sunburnt by the sun’s seasonal intensity. These figures are connected to the earth in ways that city-dwellers would not understand, and Bernard seems to flirt with the notion of a connection between the relative unsophistication of the countryside, with its inhabitants dressed as if standing outside of time and metropolitan fashion, and an ageless and enduring arcadian idyl, in holy communion with the idea of cultivation.

The facial features of all save one figure, are mostly obscured from view. The one exception is foregrounded at bottom left of the canvas. The coarseness of her mouth and nose are shown unflatteringly, her femininity blunted by toil, while her eyes are shown squinting against the sun and her cheek possibly blistered by it too, so that the initial Edenic suggestion is unsentimentally debunked. By virtue of her position, it is she who is most closely connected to the viewer, albeit that her body is cropped as if to underline the urgency of her activity, in the process of hurrying past – this isn’t idle play sonny-boy, she seems to suggest to the artist, this is proper work – out of my way!

Bernard also used the Breton theme with Le Pardon de Pont Aven (Breton Women on a Meadow), 1888, a gentler scene depicting Bretonneries as leisure.

Émile Bernard, Le Pardon de Pont Aven (Breton Women on a Meadow), 1888, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay

This is a significant work in that it was taken by Van Gogh to hang in the Yellow House in Arles and which the Dutch artist was so taken by that he made a copy of it. Here it is the much cooler yet vivid green ground colour that is striking. It’s a shadowless, flat colour field that contrasts the traditional Breton attire with the contemporary apparel of the ladies seated in the background, one holding a sunshade which pops red against the green as if to draw attention to their otherness, while the cloisonism of all figures remains evident. Despite the social nature of the gathering depicted however, there is a deliberate disconnection between the figures, as if they were cut and pasted. The pictures that Bernard made at this time represent a radically new pictorial language which, albeit inspired by art from the distant past and from other cultures, militated against the naturalism and representationalism of Ingres, David and Courbet, and strove to speak about the essence of what was visible in a more ‘primitive’ way, vesting them with authenticity on its own terms.

Later in his career, Bernard moved away from the radicalism of his early style and retreated to realism and perspective, inspired by the masters of the Italian renaissance, and, I would argue, became less interesting the more his works attained a greater finish. By contrast, it was that deliberate eschewing of finished figurative art in the late 1880s that Émile Bernard paved the way for the Nabis artists, in particular Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis, and later the Fauvists, which makes him an important figure meriting greater appreciation today.