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Lot Essay
The cross-fertilization of ideas between Bernard and Gauguin in 1888 and 1889 was pivotal to the development of pictorial symbolism. Both were set on a path away from the prevailing neo-impressionism and towards a more expressive facture capable of carrying the burden of their ideas. Bernard's Les Brettones dans la prairie of late summer 1888 (Luthi 114), with its schematic modelling of figures and cloisonniste treatment of form and space, was the immediate inspiration for Gauguin's masterpiece La vision aprs le sermon (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Indeed, such was the impact of Bernard's work on Gauguin that he took it with him to Arles to show Van Gogh.
Baigneuses belongs to a series of bather paintings Bernard dated 1889, some perhaps related to a mural, since destroyed, that he was working on at the same time. Another picture from the series, sharing several of the figures depicted in the present work, is today housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (L. 206). All these works show Bernard breaking from the Breton subject and embarking on a more ambitious and, ultimately, more abstract mission than he had hitherto attempted.
The direct inspiration for this scheme was probably Czanne whose bather pictures Bernard had been able to study at pre Tanguy's shop. In 1890, just one year after the execution of Baigneuses, the youthful Bernard wrote his first article on Czanne, praising the master's so-called 'constructive' phase of tightly knit, parallel taches of pigment: '[with their] solid impasto in slow touches from right ot left, the works of the last manner confirm the researches into a new art, strange and unknown. Weighty light glides mysteriously amongst objects both transparent and solid: an architectural gravity emanates from the ordered lines; some areas of heavy impasto prompt references to sculpture' (Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui, no. 387, 1890).
Certainly the carefully aligned brushstrokes of the present work, as well as those of Bernard's famed Madeleine au Bois d'Amour (Muse d'Orsay, Paris) painted in Brittany in the autumn of 1888, recall those of Czanne. The adumbrated modelling, moreover, seems directly descended from works such as the Czanne's Trois baigneuses (Petit Palais, Paris), once owned and treasured by Matisse.
At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, when Bernard, Gauguin and their followers took the decision to follow the lead of Courbet and Manet and establish their own pavilion in the Caf Volpini, Bernard chose to include one of his Baigneuses series in the show. It is not known which one of the series was exhibited; what is known, however, is that the picture belonged to Albert Aurier, the symbolist writer and critic whose close friendship with Bernard led to his being the first significant champion of both Gauguin and van Gogh.
Baigneuses belongs to a series of bather paintings Bernard dated 1889, some perhaps related to a mural, since destroyed, that he was working on at the same time. Another picture from the series, sharing several of the figures depicted in the present work, is today housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (L. 206). All these works show Bernard breaking from the Breton subject and embarking on a more ambitious and, ultimately, more abstract mission than he had hitherto attempted.
The direct inspiration for this scheme was probably Czanne whose bather pictures Bernard had been able to study at pre Tanguy's shop. In 1890, just one year after the execution of Baigneuses, the youthful Bernard wrote his first article on Czanne, praising the master's so-called 'constructive' phase of tightly knit, parallel taches of pigment: '[with their] solid impasto in slow touches from right ot left, the works of the last manner confirm the researches into a new art, strange and unknown. Weighty light glides mysteriously amongst objects both transparent and solid: an architectural gravity emanates from the ordered lines; some areas of heavy impasto prompt references to sculpture' (Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui, no. 387, 1890).
Certainly the carefully aligned brushstrokes of the present work, as well as those of Bernard's famed Madeleine au Bois d'Amour (Muse d'Orsay, Paris) painted in Brittany in the autumn of 1888, recall those of Czanne. The adumbrated modelling, moreover, seems directly descended from works such as the Czanne's Trois baigneuses (Petit Palais, Paris), once owned and treasured by Matisse.
At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, when Bernard, Gauguin and their followers took the decision to follow the lead of Courbet and Manet and establish their own pavilion in the Caf Volpini, Bernard chose to include one of his Baigneuses series in the show. It is not known which one of the series was exhibited; what is known, however, is that the picture belonged to Albert Aurier, the symbolist writer and critic whose close friendship with Bernard led to his being the first significant champion of both Gauguin and van Gogh.