Page 28 - Studio International - February 1966

Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group

by Charles Harrison

The Arts Council's exhibition at the Tate Gallery stimulus which unified and vitalized their efforts in the
documented and illustrated with great thoroughness one formation of a new style. From Pont-Aven paths lead
of the crucial moments in the history of art, between off toward Art Nouveau (a debt made explicit at the
Gauguin's first stay in Brittany in 1886 and his Tate by the inclusion of Mucha's friend Slewinski), the
last in 1894. This was the period of Gauguin's Nabis, Fauvism, and early abstract art.
most significant contribution to the development of The Tate exhibition's achievement was to recreate an
both painting and sculpture. He painted his greatest atmosphere and an environment and to restore to the
canvases in Tahiti and Marquesas, but during his years works shown some of the immediacy and excitement
in Brittany he was the focus of a large group of younger of theirfirstconception. It was rich in documentaryworks,
artists who received from him, directly or indirectly, a alive with the personalities and anecdotes associated
with them: the Serusier Talisman brought back by the
artist to the Academie Julian and eagerly studied by
Denis, Vallotton, Ranson, Vuillard and Bonnard; the
Gauguin and Bernard self-portraits painted for Van
Gogh; Bernard's Breton Women in the Meadow which
so excited Van Gogh in Aries; and many others. Both
Gauguin and Bernard were supremely well represented
and a unique opportunity was provided to study the
relationship between them.
Gauguin worked at Pont-Aven in 1886 but his works
of that year were still derivative-the surface appearance
of Pissarro with a structure indebted to Cezanne (viz.
View of Pont-Aven). 1886 had been a crucial year:
La Grande Jatte, Van Gogh's arrival in Paris, the
Symbolist Manifesto, the eighth and last Impressionist
Group Exhibition. In 1888, after his return from Mar­
Right
Serusier tinique and with his palette brightened by the Southern
Landscape at the Bois d'Amour light, Gauguin revisited Pont-Aven where he re­
('Le Talisman')
Oil on cigar box lid countered Emile Bernard, a brilliant twenty-year-old,
10t X Bi in. friend of Lautrec and Van Gogh, with endless theories
Inscribed on back:
'Fait sous la direction de Gauguin readily formulated, extraordinarily precocious as a
P. Serusier 1888' painter (a Bernard interior of 1887 provides a precise
Lent by the family of Maurice Denis
transition between the cerebral masterpieces of Seurat
Below and the interiors of early Bonnard and Vuillard). The
Emile Bernard
Breton Women in the Meadow 1 888 close two-year relationship between Gauguin and
Canvas Bernard was to result in an art which broke entirely with
29! X 36¼ in.
Signed and dated the styles of the '70s and '80s and contributed to that
Lent by the family of Maurice Denis realignment of attitudes towards art and expression
which characterised the last two decades of the 19th
century in France-an art in which sensation, experi­
ence, and intuition replace perspective as a means of
organising the picture space.
It seems certain-and the Tate exhibition underlined
this-that Bernard had produced canvases in Paris,
before his second meeting with Gauguin, in which the
forms were simplified beyond anything that Gauguin
had so far achieved. It is unfortunate that the terms of
reference of the exhibition could not have been
stretched to include Bernard's associate Anquetin, who
may have played a crucial part in the development of
this phase (he was represented in the Cafe Volpini
exhibition). Bernard's Breton Women in the Meadow of
1888 has a breadth and grandeur of expression extra­
ordinary in the work of so young a painter. The solemn,
swirling figures retain, within a framework largely
abstract in conception, the vibrance and dignity of real
life acutely observed, achieving the 'complication of
1
the idea through simplification of the form' which
Gauguin sought. Bernard painted nothing to surpass it.
Gauguin's Still Life with Three Puppies of the same
year has the strong outlines and flattened forms of
'c!oisonisme' with an intensely subtle organisation.
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