Emile Bernard exhibition at the Orangerie

Painter, engraver, but also an art critic, writer and poet, Emile Bernard has played a major role in the development of modern art. The exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris from September 17 to January 15 traces exhaustively the extremely varied production of a painter of which so far mainly only the early works (1886-1891) had been presented, a period when Bernard, in reaction to the excesses of Impressionism, developed the "synthesist" doctrine later adopted by Gauguin among others, that foreshadows the abstract painting.

However, until his death in 1941, Bernard will continue to develop different painting techniques while rediscovering painters of the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian- and the Spanish painter -El Greco- during his travels and during a ten-year stay in Egypt from 1893 to 1903. This "classicist" part of his work is far less known because it conflicts with the "orthodoxy" of formal abstraction and deconstruction; this exhibition enables us to rediscover that period.

Bernard is not only a painter but also a writer, often writing under assumed names poems -Apollinaire regarded as a major symbolist poet - and novels, and in his art critics he develops his ideas on painting. He published his correspondence with his friend van Gogh and talks with Cézanne whom he met in Aix at the end of his life and profoundly influenced his painting. Bernard’s writings are indeed now a major source of knowledge on these painters.

Bernard is also an accomplished and demanding artist also addressing the decorative arts and especially printmaking and illustrated books for Ambroise Vollard.

Featuring works from all periods of the artist rarely seen because originating from foreign museums, the exhibition invites us to rediscover this unloved and badly known painter who however played a major role in the history of painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

We will visit this exhibition 20/11 at 9:15 tickets are available for those who wish to join us.