Summary of Cloisonnism and Synthetism
Synthetism and Cloisonnism are two terms applied to a closely overlapping set of works created by Post-Impressionist painters during the 1880s-1890s. Spearheaded by the young artists Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, Cloisonnism was a type of painting which combined large, flat color planes with heavy black outlines, first described as such in 1888. Synthetism emerged in the years immediately following, including through creative collaboration between Bernard and Paul Gauguin, and attached a more emotive and visionary quality to the techniques of Cloisonnism. Taken together, Cloisonnism and Synthetism indicate a collective inward emotional and spiritual turn in the Post-impressionist generations, foregoing attempts to depict precisely what the eye saw in favor of feeling and symbolism.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Synthetism and Cloisonnism can be usefully contrasted with another Post-Impressionist movement, Neo-Impressionism, often called Pointillism. Whereas the Pointillist painters used scientific theory and precise techniques to recreate the way in which light affected the human retina, the Synthetists and Cloisonnists believed that the real legacy of Impressionism lay in allowing the artist to show how a scene or landscape made them feel. In their attachment to intuition, emotion, and spirituality, the Synthetists and Cloisonnists set the tone for a whole range of modern and contemporary art, including Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and much more.
- The Synthetists were amongst many French artistic groupings who relocated from cities to rural and remote locations to find artistic inspiration during the late nineteenth century-in their case the village of Pont-Aven in Brittany. Though they followed the example of the Barbizon painters, the Realists, and others in this, the Synthetists were amongst the first truly avant-garde groups to situate themselves in this rustic context, setting the tone for many rural avant-garde collectives to come, such as the St. Ives Group in Britain.
- Whereas the Impressionists were notable for stripping their work of religious connotations, locating themselves in contemporary urban life, the Synthetists and Cloisonnists, in particular Gauguin and Bernard, are notable for reintegrating spiritual imagery into avant-garde art. This reflected their investment in vision and intuition, and predicted the credo of many movements and artists to come, including Expressionism.
- Paul Gauguin's practice would not have developed in the way it did without his passing through the Synthetist-Cloisonnist milieu. It was, in particular, through his collaborations and discussions with Bernard (and others at Pont-Aven) came to find the means of expressing inner vision through scene and landscape that would be carried through into his Primitivist and Symbolist work. In this sense, Synthetism and Cloisonnism are at the very heart of one of the most significant individual oeuvres of modern painting.
Key Artists
Progression of Art
Portrait of Bernard's Grandmother
This portrait is one of several that Bernard made of his grandmother. Occupying the left half of the canvas, she wears a black mourning dress, hat, and earrings, the color intensifying her formidable presence. Her husband had just died and she had moved in with Bernard's family, where she often posed for the artist. She was blind in her right eye, which is here shown closed and in shadow, turned away from the viewer. Nonetheless, she turns toward the viewer with a penetrating gaze. Her face and her expression are outlined in strong black lines, simplifying and strengthening the downward line of her mouth and the raised curve of her eyebrows. The red and blue floral curtain behind her, and the white curve of a pillow on the right, along with the brown hatbox, are outlined in black, contributing to the two-dimensional flatness of the work.
In formal terms, as Joost van der Hoeven notes, "the impact of Japanese woodblock prints is evident in ...the use of strongly defined outlines and areas of even colour", while the lack of perspectival depth is "also characteristic of Japanese prints". Van der Hoeven adds that "Bernard combined parallel hatched paint strokes borrowed from Cézanne with his own characteristic contour lines and flat planes, to arrive at what he called his 'perfected cloisonnism'." In thematic terms, the work reflects Bernard's closeness with his grandmother, to whom he had written three years previously: "without taking away from my mother by blood what is due to her, I can love you according to what you have always done for me: as a true mother". Because his grandmother supported his artistic efforts, no matter how implausible or experimental they seemed to the rest of the family, his bond with her included a kind of identification, as he said they were "the two pariahs of the house".
This early work of Cloisonnism made a great impression on Vincent van Gogh. He traded his Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) for this painting, which remained part of his collection, influencing his An Old Woman of Arles (1888). In 1888 Van Gogh wrote to Bernard about a small group of his works, including this one, "have you ever done better, have you ever been more yourself, and someone? Not in my opinion...Do you know what made me like these 3 or 4 studies so much? That je ne sais quoi of something deliberate, very wise, that je ne sais quoi of something steady and firm and sure of oneself, which they show. You've never been closer to Rembrandt, my dear chap, than then."
Oil on canvas - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Avenue de Clichy ("Five O'Clock in the Evening")
This signature work of Anquetin's depicts a street scene in Montmartre, at five in the evening when everything is bathed in the blue light of dusk. People hurry home from work or stop in shops and cafes. On the left, a butcher shop glows with a warm orange, and the bright yellow flames of two lanterns overhead punctuate the path forward. The contrast of color and light animates the scene, while at the same time the use of complementary colors unifies and creates the sense of atmosphere. Most of the crowd appears to be walking away from the viewer, with the notable exception of the woman partially visible on the lower right, her form outlined in black. All of the human bodies and objects in the composition are similarly outlined, even the edges of the overhead awning, creating an ornamental effect akin to stained-glass windows, as the term "cloison" originally alluded to.
Though the work evokes Anquetin's own life - this street led through his neighborhood, and the butcher shop may also allude to his father's butcher shop in Normandy - it eschews naturalism. As curator Oliver Tostmann writes, Bernard "minimized his palette of colors, flattened forms, and emphasized contours, in order to push the aesthetic norms and boundaries of the time". Tostmann adds that the work "had a profound effect on fellow artists such as Van Gogh. Shortly after Anquetin finished Avenue de Clichy, Van Gogh included the painting in his seminal exhibition 'Peintres du Petit Boulevard,' held at a nearby restaurant in 1887. It may have even inspired Van Gogh's later work such as The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles at Night (1888)." This work is one of Anquetin's best-known and, because of its pronounced use of the typical features of the movement, and its impact on the artist's peers, is considered a signature work of Cloisonnism.
Oil on canvas - Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT
The Talisman (Landscape at the Bois d'Amour)
This distinctive and compelling work approaches pure abstraction with its irregular areas of vivid yellow, green, and dark brown punctuated by a red horizontal line with blue vertical lines, representing a valley traversed by a bridge. The squint planes of color evoke the shapes of overflowing foliage and suggest an organic landscape. Maurice Denis, Sérusier's fellow student, wrote in 1903 of seeing the work for the first time, "thus we were presented, for the first time, in a form that was paradoxical and unforgettable, the fertile concept of a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order".
Studying at the Lycée Fontaine and Académie Julian, Sérusier befriended Denis, along with Pierre Bonnard, and Émile Bernard. With Bernard's encouragement he visited Pont-Aven in 1888 to paint the countryside, creating this work following a walk with Gauguin. Later, Sérusier recounted how, on their stroll, Gauguin prompted: "how do you see these trees? They're yellow. So, put some yellow. This shadow, it's rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Put vermillion." Accordingly, the artist wrote "Made in October 1888 under the direction of Gauguin by P. Sérusier at Pont-Aven" on the back of the canvas. Initially, Sérusier viewed the work as unfinished, but he left it as it was,, perhaps encouraged by its reception amongst his fellow artists. The painting, though created en plein air, departs significantly from the approach of the Impressionists. As the Musée d'Orsay notes, "although they were determined that visual sensation should prevail over the intellectual perception of the world, the impressionists had not given up a conception of painting implying the representation of what they observed. Here the mimetic conception is thoroughly replaced by the search for a coloured equivalent."
Denis and Bonnard founded the Nabis ("Wild Beasts") group and took this work as a prototype. For that reason, Paul-Élie Ranson, who housed it in his studio, where the group often met, dubbed it "The Talisman", and the name became attached to the piece. As art critic Heidi Ellison writes, "the little painting, which Sérusier gave to Maurice Denis as if it were 'a relic,' according to Denis, came to be seen as a foundational work for the Nabis". It inspired a number of paintings, and Denis made the work a cornerstone of his artistic theory. By the mid-1890s, Sérusier had turned to Theosophy and for a time retreated to a Benedictine abbey and art school to practice his faith. The continued advocacy of Maurice Denis kept Sérusier's reputation alive, however, and this painting eventually became part of the collection in the Musée d'Orsay.
Oil on panel - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Le Pardon de Pont-Aven ("Breton Women in the Meadow")
This painting depicts women gathering in a meadow after a pardon, a religious procession in Breton in honor of the patron saint of St. Joseph Church, an event that Bernard attended along with Gauguin. The women are dressed in their Sunday best, including the distinctive Breton headdress or coiffe bigoudène familiar from many Pont-Aven paintings, and arranged in various groups. Most of the women are depicted in pairs, though a single woman in black rests on the grass on the lower left. Her shape creates a subtle diagonal that runs upwards across the canvas to the trio of women in the upper right.
This painting is radical in its use of color, the shock of lime green used to depict the grass, without shadow or depth, emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane, such that the figures seem to float in space, a quality reflecting the influence of Japanse ukiyo-e prints. In spite of its formal inventiveness, however, the depiction of the women's hats is relatively accurate and connects the work to the realities of rural Brittany. Writing in Revue des Deux Mondes ("Review of the Two Worlds") in 1881, the poet and novelist André Theuriet described the traditional clothing of Breton women as "reminiscent of the Lapland type... Their dress has a liveliness of oriental color: wide yellow or scarlet breastplates, corsages and cuffs supported by silver, green skirts embellished with dazzling embroidery."
Curator of the Musée d'Orsay, Claire Bernardi, describes Breton Women in the Meadow as "a very important milestone in late nineteenth century paintings" and a foundational work of Synthetism, noting that, alongside Paul Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon, it inaugurated "a new style of painting". Bernardi adds that "the luminous intensity that emerges from this painting and the power of its palette", as well as its innovation "in the way of representing the human figure, with distorted features and the use of very bold framing", had "a strong impact on contemporary artists". Van Gogh was one of these, creating a watercolor copy of the work and sending it to his brother Theo "to show him the new stylistic forms employed by Bernard". The painting also had a major influence on the Nabis, whose co-leader Maurice Denis bought the work in 1903 and subsequently exhibited it alongside Sérusier's The Talisman and Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon on various occasions.
Oil on canvas - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Vision after the Sermon
With its clear outlines, bold planes of color, and flattened perspective, Gauguin's famous work takes on the intense simplicity of a vision. Prompted by a sermon on the Biblical story of Jacob and the angel, the women in the foreground - in their traditional Pont-Aven dress - seem to be our point of visual entry - we see the work as if through their eyes. On the far right, the village priest with his head lowered and eyes closed can be partially glimpsed. To the left, a woman in profile, her eyes closed, leans over her hands in prayer, a line of women behind her assuming the same posture.
Gauguin said of this work, which is seen as a talisman of both Synthetism and Symbolism, that "the landscape and the fight exist only in the imaginations of the people praying after the sermon". In 'synthesizing' the scene observed with inward, imaginative vision, Gauguin's work stands at the forefront of a whole swath of approaches to modern painting. The intensity of color is utilized to recreate this imaginary world. In a letter to van Gogh, he described the work's palette: "the angel is dressed in violent ultramarine blue, and Jacob in bottle green. The angel's wings pure no. 1 chrome yellow. The angel's hair no. 2 chrome and the feet flesh-orange" and all the elements in the painting are united by the earth, a "pure vermillion". The deep red of the ground around the wrestling pair plays a particular role both in signifying the departure from naturalism and bringing the picture plane up short against the viewer's vision, while also alluding to the blood of Christian sacrifice.
Although it is seen as a forerunner of many subsequent works, the traditions on which this work draws, both immediate and far-flung, are rich and various. Bernard's Cloisonnism, in particular his Breton Women in the Meadow (1888), was an inspiration to Gauguin at this time, as was Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printing. Art historian Mathew Hervan notes that "it was Émile Bernard who pointed out the general influence of Japanese prints on Gauguin's work. This seems self-evident when one compares Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon to Vincent van Gogh's Trees, a copy after Hiroshige, with its diagonally placed tree and use of red". Similarly, in Gauguin's painting, the diagonal of a brown tree trunk divides the scene between the real world of the Breton women and the spiritual world of the vision. Hervan adds that Bernard cited Hokusai's Sumo wrestlers in The Manga "as the source of Gauguin's struggling angel and Jacob".
Oil on canvas - Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Self-portrait with Portrait of Gauguin
In this self-portrait Émile Bernard faces the viewer with a thoughtful gaze. He wears a large, soft hat, a band of black outlining the brim, and his figure and clothing are outlined with thick black lines, creating areas of color filled with almost pastel browns, blues, and flesh tones. The light turquoise background is otherwise empty except for the artist's signature and the phrase "Dedicated for 'his fellow' Vincent, 1888" written above the portrait of Gauguin. Additionally, to the bottom right, a Japanese woodblock print is visible, a self-conscious gesture indicating the influence of ukiyo-e printing on Bernard's artistic evolution.
This work exemplifies Bernard's Cloisonnism, with areas of pure color bordered by thick black lines. The work seems almost two-dimensional, and in its decorative jouissance of line and color it rejects not only naturalism but also the Impressionists' focus on capturing the world as the eye saw it. As Joost van der Hoeven writes, "Bernard actively rejected a style that placed visual perception at its core. What mattered more than 'nature' was 'the invisible meaning hidden beneath the mute form of exterior appearance'." Van der Hoeven adds that "both Japanese art and the work of Cézanne provided Bernard with a model for simplifying his motifs. He believed that this simplification allowed him to distil the true essence from reality".
This work was created in response to van Gogh's request that Bernard and Gauguin each paint a portrait of the other and send it to him, following the example of Japanese printmakers. As the Van Gogh Museum notes, "each of them sent a self-portrait featuring a sketch of the other. Beside his signature, Bernard wrote a dedication to his friend ('copain') Van Gogh. The added 'g' at the end of 'copain' was a joke about the local accent in Provence, where Van Gogh was living. Gauguin's painting was Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables) (1888), where he cast himself as Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
Oil on canvas - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Earthly Paradise
This cabinet is a one-of-a-kind object created by Gauguin and Bernard when they were working together at Pont-Aven. Art historian Gloria Groom calls it "a unique testament to the era's re-evaluation of easel painting". Two glass doors, revealing inner shelves, are framed by panels of polychrome carvings. Bernard's carving on the left panel depicts a number of Breton women and elements of the rural landscape. Portraits of Breton women wearing the white coiffe face the viewer or are viewed in profile at the lower left. To the right, Gauguin's carvings include figures in a landscape influenced by his trip to Martinique the year before, while the top panel depicts three pairs of Breton women and a rural landscape. The central panel, also carved by Gauguin, shows two women, one wearing the Breton coiffe and the other resembling a woman of Martinique. Above them a large figure, outlined by a tree branch, evokes both a Christ-like figure and a primitive idol.
According to the Art Institute of Chicago, "this unique object was created collaboratively", "combining painting, sculpture, and carpentry". Gauguin and Bernard's artistic experiments, "often undertaken in the spirit of friendly competition, challenged hierarchical distinctions between fine art, grounded in aesthetics, and decorative art, associated with functionality". When they began working closely together in Brittany, as Groom notes, "both were already experimenting with nonillusionistic space, flat areas of color, and heavy outlines inspired by earlier decorative traditions". Both also "desired to integrate art into everyday life". Anticipating the medievalist spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which also broke down distinctions between functional and 'high' art, Bernard carved the panel on left in a way that "closely resemble[d] the medievalizing woodcuts he began making a few months later", according to Groom.
Because of the mixed authorship of this work, it is uncertain who created the lower panel from which the work draws its title, showing Adam and Eve and a large snake reclining on the ground on either side of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This panel reflects the importance of wild and rural locations to the Cloisonnist and Synthetist group. It is less a Garden of Eden that the artists depict here then a fusion of the landscapes of Brittany or Martinique, where they felt they had found more 'primitive' and harmonious ways of life.
Chestnut and pine, carved and polychromed; glass, metal hardware - Art Institute of Chicago
Le Christ Jaune ("The Yellow Christ")
In this iconic work from 1889, Gauguin uses broad planes of striking color to transpose the Christian crucifixion into the Breton countryside. Yellow for Christ's body and fields in the background, flaming orange for the trees, and so on. The colors evoke the autumn harvest as well as the time of day when the painting is 'set', Angelus, or the period of evening prayer. The flamelike hues also allude to religious passion. Three peasant women, analogous to the three Marias at the crucifixion, kneel in prayer at the base of the cross. Influenced by Émile Bernard's Cloisonnism, Gauguin here adopts the black outlines of the style, so that the work takes on the effect of a painted icon.
This work reflects the influence of traditional religious symbolism on the Cloissonists and Synthetists, which the Impressionists had tended to reject in favor of scenes of contemporary urban life. As the Buffalo AKG Art Museum notes, "the central figure of this painting is based on a seventeenth-century painted wooden crucifix that hangs in the nearby Trémalo Chapel". The museum's website adds that Gauguin "chose the color yellow to convey how he felt about the isolated life and piety of the peasants." The artists' admiration for the Breton peasants' 'primitivism' and simple way of life, governed by the cycle of nature, can be felt in the pale orange tones that connect their skin with the color of the earth.
In contrast, the crucified Christ, with his head tilted, his arms elongated and slack, seems resigned, almost defeated, perhaps expressing the artist's disillusionment with Christian belief - as some critics have suggested. However, the figure may also represent Gauguin's view of his own suffering and artistic rejection - the artists would come to associate himself with the crucified Christ increasingly strongly over the course of his career. In any case, he subsequently acknowledged this work's importance by including a recreation of it as a prop in his Portrait de l'Artiste au Christ Jaune ("Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ") (c. 1890-91). Created before his first trip to Tahiti, that work is described by the Musée d'Orsay as "a true manifesto", and became a prototype for Symbolism and Primitivism. As such, this earlier work can be seen to contain the essence of Gauguin's later aesthetic gestures, themselves highly influential on the development of twentieth-century art.
Oil on canvas - Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York
Jeune Femme Lisant un Journal, ("Young Woman Reading a Newspaper")
Shown in profile, a young woman focuses intently on the newspaper in her hand , which appears as a strange, blue, glowing shape. Likewise, the entire room and the young woman herself are bathed in a deep turquoise light, rendering an impression of dreamlike solitude. The particular tone of blue that Anquetin chose for this work - created in soft pastels - was associated with absinthe, leading, as the art historian Robert Alley notes, to this work being "known for many years as 'The Absinthe Drinker', a title which seems to be incorrect". Rather than a random tavern drinker, the woman depicted was probably a professional model, whom Anquetin also portrayed in Jeune Femme à l'Ombrelle (Young Woman with An Umbrella) (1891).
Art critic Édouard Dujardin wrote of Anquetin in 1888 that "at first sight, his works proclaim the idea of decorative painting....Outline, in quasi-abstract sign, gives the character of the object, unity of colour determines the atmosphere, fixes the sensation." Dujardin further noted the influence of ukiyo-e prints on the artist's work. It was also Dujardin who gave "Cloisonnism" its name, while attributing its development solely to Anquetin, a move which offended Émile Bernard and drove a wedge between the two friends and artistic collaborators. As Christie's notes, "Anquetin's position as a leading modernist lasted only a few years. In 1892 he began to study the work of Rubens, Titian and Tintoretto, which inspired him to undertake what he called his 'retour au métier,' a return to traditional craftsmanship in painting".
Pastel on Paper - Tate Museum, London
Beginnings of Cloisonnism and Synthetism
Cloisonnism and Émile Bernard
Though the terms Synthetism and Cloisonnism are sometimes used simultaneously, the movements were distinctive in evolution. Émile Bernard developed Cloisonnism, which he called synthèses géométriques (geometric syntheses), in early 1887. Art historian Joost van der Hoeven describes the artist's intent "to simplify motifs to their most essential form". To this end, Bernard worked closely with Louis Anquetin, a fellow student at the studio of Fernand Corman, in developing the style.
Both young men had begun as Neo-Impressionists, drawn to the paintings of Paul Signac. However, they became disillusioned with what they saw as the over-analytical and emotionless approach of the movement, often defined with reference to one of its primary techniques, Pointillism. Pointillism involved the use of precisely arranged dots of color which the viewer would blend in their mind's eye. As Bernard put it, "the mechanical work of pointillism seems to me to be the opposite of any true temperament".
Cloisonnism, by contrast, emphasized two-dimensionality or flatness, combining areas of pure color outlined in heavy black lines. Van der Hoeven notes that, "instead of breaking down colours into short strokes and dots, Bernard and Anquetin pursued a théorie contraire (contrary theory) in which they focused on lines and planes of uniform colour. They drew inspiration from various sources, including medieval tapestries, stained glass and Japanese prints."
Ukiyo-e
Bernard and Anquetin encountered ukiyo-e, Japanese wood block printing, through Vincent van Gogh, who had arranged an exhibition from his own collection at the Café le Tambourin in Paris in early 1887. Admiring the prints, particularly those of of Hiroshige and Hokusai, Bernard said, the Japanese prints "led us toward simplicity". He was later to explain, "anything that overloads a spectacle covers it in reality and occupies our eyes to the detriment of our minds. You have to simplify the spectacle to draw out its meaning. You have to take a schematic approach, as it were". Ukiyo-e also influenced the artists' explorations in other media. As art historian Caroline Boyle-Turner writes, "Bernard's interest in printmaking probably began as early as 1887 when he was working closely with Van Gogh. Bernard admitted his debt to Japanese prints in the development of 'Cloisonnism.'"
Peintres du Petit Boulevard
As well as introducing Bernard and Anquetin to ukiyo-e, Van Gogh played a role in introducing Cloisonnism to the public. In 1887, the Dutch artist organized an exhibition called Peintres du Petit Boulevard ("Painters of the Small Boulevard") at a restaurant in Montmartre. As van der Hoeven notes, van Gogh coined the term "painters of the petit boulevard" in conversation with his brother, "referring to up and coming artists like himself who were experimenting with Neo-Impressionism and other avant-garde techniques". The artists to whom Van Gogh applied the term included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, another student of Fernand Corman's in Montmartre, as well as Bernard and Anquetin.
Van Gogh contrasted these painters of the small boulevard with the "Painters of the Grand Boulevard", who exhibited in more official exhibitions, and whose work could be found in major galleries. As such, this was another instance, by now common in French painting, of artists rejected by mainstream galleries setting up independent and rival exhibitions which would turn out to be greatly more influential on art history. However, Bernard, who did not want to display alongside the Neo-impressionists, actually withdrew his work from Van Gogh's show, indicating the extent to which the Post-impressionist avant-garde was itself breaking into different groups by this time.
Édouard Dujardin
The writer and critic Édouard Dujardin gave Cloisonnism its name, as he felt the style resembled traditional French enamel work or cloisonné. In its original usage, the term cloisonné referred to the compartments (cloisons in French) of a metal framework inlaid with glass, enamel, or gemstones. This was an ancient technique dating back to the time of the pharaohs, as seen in the Pectoral of Senusret II (c.1880s BCE). During the Medieval era, Limoges enamels had become particularly well-known in France. In the early nineteenth century these antique objects became widely popular with art collectors, with exhibitions held in London and Paris and leading museums adding cloisonné work to their collections.
In 1888, Dujardin attended the exhibit of Les XX where he encountered the work of Louis Anquetin. Founded in 1883, Les XX (The Twenty) was a group of Belgian artists associated with Symbolism which had held an exhibition every year from 1884 until 1893, regularly inviting artists from outside the group to participate. Anquetin showed his work at the group's 1888 show, as did Signac. However, Bernard steadfastly refused to exhibit alongside Signac, not wanting any association with a movement, Neo-impressionism, which he had rejected. As van der Hoeven notes, Anquetin's Avenue de Clichy (1887) "caught the attention of the art critic Edouard Dujardin, who wrote a laudatory review in La revue indépendente, proclaiming Anquetin as the first practitioner of cloisonnism". By contrast, Bernard, "by refusing to exhibit alongside Signac...missed out on opportunities for exposure and recognition".
Pont-Aven
Pont-Aven, a fishing village on the Brittany coast, became popular with artists in the mid-1800s. As early as 1830, the Barbizon School, including Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet, and others, had started moving to remote villages to pursue en plein air painting of rugged landscapes and rural peasant life. The trend continued with subsequent generations of artists. The Realists and the Impressionists sought out the villages of Brittany, including Pont-Aven. By the 1880s the village had become a center for international artists, often with very different styles and approaches. For instance, the Pont-Aven School also included Irish artists such as Augustus Nicholas Burke, Roderic O'Conor, and Nathaniel Hill, who painted in styles more informed by Naturalism and early Post-Impressionism.
In 1886, Paul Gauguin visited Pont-Aven, having been disappointed by an Impressionist exhibition in which he had recently shown his work, finding his fellow artists' offerings "full of affectations". Christie's notes that "in a bid for a fresh start...he set out west from the French capital towards the Atlantic coast...he'd heard that the landscape was pretty and, more importantly, living was cheap". Gauguin ended up taking several extended trips to Pont-Aven, where he met the much younger painters Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier. The trio worked closely together as Gauguin turned away from Impressionism. The village depended upon fishing and agriculture, and many of the peasants wore traditional clothing - particularly eye-catching were the large white headdresses or coiffes that women wore, which appear in many paintings created at this time.
As Boyle-Turner writes, Gauguin "loved Brittany because there he discovered a relatively 'savage' and 'primitive' way of life which retained the simplicity and vestiges of a spiritual purity that had been forever lost in the sophisticated modern world". Gauguin himself wrote that "I find there the savage, the primitive. When my clogs resound on the granite soil, I hear the muffled, dull, powerful tone that I seek in my painting".
Also arriving in Pont-Aven in 1886, Bernard said of his life there: "I returned to the past, isolating myself more and more from my own period, whose preoccupations with industrialism disgusted me. Little by little I became a man of the Middle Ages. I adored Brittany." However, as Boyle-Turner further notes, "with all of this said, it must not be forgotten that the aesthetic questions these artists found most intriguing were primarily abstract. Their concerns were line, color, rhythm, and harmony, and their subjects were chosen for their ability to best allow the exploration of these non-objective ideas. The coiffes, rolling hills bordered by fences and hedges, the coasts, cottages, and animals were ideal vehicles for the expression of the smoothly flowing lines and repeated forms that characterize Synthetism."
Synthetism
The development of Synthetism is often attributed to Paul Gauguin during his period of artistic exploration in Pont-Aven. However, it drew heavily upon the flat ornamental style of Cloisonnism and was developed as the older artist worked closely with the much younger Bernard. Art critic Abigail Yoder wrote that Gauguin's "most inventive period came during a brief but intense 10-week span in Brittany in 1888 working alongside the artist Émile Bernard... they became close friends and collaborators, exchanging ideas about aesthetic principles that dramatically shaped their own works and the direction of Modern art leading into the 20th century." As van der Hoeven notes, though Gauguin "never adopted the Cloisonnist practice of separating forms with heavy outlines, his key painting of the period, Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888), clearly shows the Cloisonnist influence in its dramatic juxtapositions of saturated colours."
This feverish exploration and collaboration led to the development of Synthetism. Boyle-Turner notes that Bernard's Le Pardon de Pont-Aven (Breton Women in the Meadow) (1888) represents "a summation of his Cloisonnist and Synthetist ideals of the time", with its "limited palette, cut-off forms, outlined flat shapes, and arbitrary use of space". Gauguin created his famous Vision after the Sermon (1888) after seeing Bernard's painting, perhaps also inspired by the same local religious festival that both artists had recently attended. Gauguin's work is seen as the embodiment of Synthetism, with its pure flat colors and visual rhythms 'synthesizing' the emotions of the artist.
Café Volpini
Gauguin organized the exhibition that publicly launched Synthetism in June 1889 during the Paris Universal Exhibition, working with his friend, artist Claude-Émile Schuffenecker. The show, titled Groupe Impressioniste et Synthétiste, was held at the Café Volpini across from the Universal Exhibition's Press Pavilion. It featured over 100 works by eight artists including Anquetin, Bernard, Gauguin, Charles Laval, Léon Fauché, Louis Roy, and others. As noted by the Musée Pont-Aven, "the promotional poster for the exhibitions includes a mysterious Némo [an artist exhibiting anonymously under that name]. This was none other than the young Émile Bernard, who chose that pseudonym in tribute to the famous novel by Jules Verne", and who thus appeared twice. Alongside their paintings, Gauguin and Bernard also exhibited their innovative zincographs, prints created using zinc plates, which could be viewed upon request.
The exhibition at the Café Volpini was considered a failure: not a single artwork was sold. However, as the Musée Pont-Aven notes, "despite all the odds, it was the first public presentation of artwork from the Synthetist movement", and did something to build the notoriety of the movement. Once again, Anquetin's Avenue de Clichy received a great deal of critical attention, building upon the interest generated when it was shown in Van Gogh's Peintres du Petit Boulevard exhibition in 1887. As a result, many critics assumed Anquetin led the new movement, overlooking the importance of both Bernard and Gauguin. This would lead to some tensions and rivalries within the group.
Cloisonnism and Synthetism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends
Form and Emotion
Within the wide landscape of Post-impressionist painters in France in the 1880-90s, it is important to distinguish between two fundamental approaches. Each built on Impressionism's insistence on recording the world as it appeared at a particular moment to the perceiving eye and mind. But the distinctions between these approaches represent some fundamental contrasts in modern and contemporary art between the formalist and the intuitive, even the Classical and the Romantic.
On the one hand, the Neo-Impressionists, such as Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, favored a highly analytical approach to their work. Their best-known technique, Pointillism, involved applying tiny dots to the canvas by which planes of color were broken up into their constituent tones. The viewer was then to reconstruct the image, performing the blending work of the paintbrush, in their mind's eye. This was intended to allow the most immediate and intimate possible engagement with the visual content of the scene represented. Informed by the contemporary science of optics, Neo-Impressionism - which also spawned the similar technique of Divisionism - thus relied on a highly thought-through, carefully planned approach to painting, with visual and emotional effects orchestrated, as it were, in advance.
Bernard, Anquetin, Gauguin, and other artists associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism came to reject this approach as lacking in creative warmth. When they developed a new technique using flat planes of color with thick outlines between them, it was intended to bring Post-impressionist painting back to a kind of primitive intuition about the emotional - perhaps more than visual - content of a scene. In this sense, they both built on the emotion-led approach of other Post-Impressionist artists such as Van Gogh and predicted the emergence of later movements, notably Expressionism, which would distort line, shape, and other aspects of composition to represent the emotional content of what was observed.
Religious Subjects
Cloisonnism and Synthetism were innovative and experimental movements but, like other avant-garde movements of the era such as Symbolism, were steeped in religious iconography, perhaps reflecting the emotion-led approach outlined above. Works such as Bernard's Le Pardon de Pont-Aven (1888) or Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon (1888) seemed to hark back to rustic Christian traditions, a notable contrast with the scenes of bourgeois life favored by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. While Gauguin and Bernard often portrayed religious festivals amongst villagers in Pont-Aven, making the works in question genre pieces as much as devotional ones, they also portrayed Christian subjects such as the crucifixion more directly. Examples include Gauguin's Green Christ and Yellow Christ (1889) and Bernard's Yellow Christ (1889), the shared titles showing the spirit of collective creativity in which the artists were working at the time.
The embrace of religious subject matter did not only reflect a new artistic direction but also a spiritual awakening. In 1888, after an aesthetic and personal crisis, Bernard found his way forward by working on an extended mural on the walls of a studio space, as van der Hoeven notes: "the renewed self-confidence and energy was fuelled by a new project he had undertaken: decorating two of the walls of a studio space... with biblical themes. On one wall he painted the Circumcision of Christ, on the other the Adoration of the Shepherd." While the style of these works was by now established, the subject matter was new. Having grown up Catholic but fallen away from his family's faith, Bernard was later to note that "Brittany had turned me back into a Catholic ready to fight for the Church".
Like Bernard, Gauguin was drawn to the simple and intense faith of the Breton people. Art historian Isabelle Cahn notes that "in Brittany ... Gauguin began to be interested in religious subjects, an interest which lasted until the end of his life. Clearly attracted by Catholicism, strongly felt in this province, and later, when he moved to Tahiti, by the study of the Maori religion and mythology, he abandoned conventional imagery to practice syncretism and to identify himself with the figure of the betrayed Christ of Golgotha."
Self-Portraiture
Synthetism was not known for formal portraiture, as the artists associated with the movement most often depicted groups of villagers, frequently Breton women in their traditional dress, in religious or pastoral settings. Additionally, the villagers were often reluctant to pose, as Bernard noted in his letters, and Breton women wanted to avoid any suggestion of immodesty. Yet the movement was marked by distinctive forms of self-portraiture, works which were created not only define a style but to mark out an artist's identity and significance to the close-knit avant-garde group. Vincent van Gogh, known for his own exploration of self-portraiture, influenced this development by encouraging Bernard, Gauguin, and Charles Laval to send him self-portraits in exchange for his own.
Self-fashioning through portraiture often involved allusions to literary and religious sources. In his Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les Misérables) (1888), Gauguin connected himself with Victor Hugo's famous novel Les Misérables (1862), and in particular with Jean Valjean, the unjustly persecuted hero. Van Gogh, meanwhile, was particularly struck by Laval's self-portraiture, writing to his brother Theo of one work that it was "very powerful, very distinguished", "precisely one of the paintings that you talk about: that one has in one's possession before others have recognised the talent." A close friend of Gauguin's, Laval had worked with him from 1886 onwards, eventually traveling with him to Martinique and then to Pont-Aven.
Zincographs
Bernard and Gauguin began exploring printmaking in 1889 through zincography, a kind of lithography using zinc plates to press images onto paper, vellum, or other surfaces. Drawn to combining different techniques, Bernard created his first zincographs, such as Les Bretonneries (1889), by copying his woodblock designs onto zinc plates, adding watercolor and gouache paint to the finished work in the above case. As the Van Gogh Museum writes, "this combination allowed Bernard the flexibility to make changes on the zincographic plate while still retaining the Medieval aesthetic of the woodcut".
The emergence of zincography owed much to the friendship of Gauguin and Bernard. Gauguin taught the younger artist wood-carving in Pont-Aven in 1888, while they were working on bas reliefs (carvings in shallow relief) for cupboards commissioned by local aristocrats. Later the same year, Bernard reciprocated by introduced a newly discovered variant of zincography to Gauguin. Boyle-Turner notes that, "according to Bernard, the two artists executed their zincs separately, without seeing the other's work. Bernard claims that after Gauguin had seen his prints, he then did two more, 'in the manner that I had discovered.' This 'new' method refers to a mixing of ink and water, called a lavis, which was then applied to the zinc plate with a brush in order to obtain the variegated greys that so effectively create the intermediate tones in both artists' zincographs."
The artists exhibited these works at the Volpini exhibition. Bernard's Les Bretonneries was a series composed of new work - seven prints depicting Breton subjects - and Gauguin's Dessins lithographiques (Lithographic Drawings) contained eleven prints, drawn from earlier works and depicting subjects from Martinique, Brittany, and Arles. The resulting prints exemplify the simplified and rugged aesthetic of the Pont-Aven circle and also reflect the influence of Japanese and medieval woodblock prints.
Other artists connected to Gauguin, including Armand Seguin, Roderic O'Conor, Paul Sérusier, Henri Delavallée, and Robert Bevan, also created prints at this time. As Boyle-Turner writes, "Bernard, Seguin, and O'Conor especially ... give evidence in their prints of a bold grasp of abstract design principles and technical achievements....They used nature only as a starting point for their designs, the abstract qualities of which remained their main preoccupation. In their exploration of the technical properties of print-making, these artists also showed a remarkable boldness and inventiveness".
For Gauguin. Boyle-Turner adds, printmaking might have seemed like a way of making money to supplement his painting career, because the works could be sold in multiples and would serve as "almost a prospectus" for his painted pieces. Though that effort was not successful, these works "signalled the beginning of Pont-Aven printmaking," and "were, moreover, a major early source of dissemination of the Pont-Aven-Synthetist style."
Later Developments - After Cloisonnism and Synthetism
Cloisonnism and Synthetism had come to an end as movements by the early 1890s. Gauguin and Bernard had a bitter argument in 1891, after which Gauguin left for the South Seas in 1891 and Bernard for Egypt and the Middle East in 1893. The artists' styles led in entirely divergent directions from that point onwards. Gauguin became identified with Symbolism while Bernard adopted a more classical, academic approach informed by the Old Masters and his travels in Arabic countries. Nonetheless, the brief output of Cloisonnism and Synthetism would echo through subsequent generations of modern painters.
The most significant short-term impact of Cloisonnism and Synthetism was on the group known as Les Nabis ("Wild Beasts"). One of the group's members, Maurice Denis took a number of signature works from Cloisonnism and Synthetism as exemplars of what his own group was trying to achieve, including Sérusier's The Talisman (1888), Bernard's Le Pardon de Pont-Aven (1888), and Gauguin's After the Sermon (1888). The use of bold, flat planes and emotionally expressive colors was incorporated wholesale into the Nabis' aesthetic.
At the same time, many of Gauguin's Synthetist works, such as The Yellow Christ (1889), influenced the emergence of what would become known as Primitivism, stressing the divestment of formal technique, an engagement with rustic, rural, and non-western themes and subjects, and an intuitive, emotion-led approach to form and shape. Bernard's groundbreaking work in Cloisonnism and Synthetism, meanwhile, including his emphasis on decorative flatness, had a significant influence on the Art Nouveau movement of the early twentieth century, and on its Germanic variant, Jugendstil. Boyle-Turner surmises that the influence of Bernard, Gauguin, and "painters of the Pont-Aven Circle on many artists of later periods...is by now well recognized".
Taking a more macrocosmic view of the subject, the basic direction in Post-impressionist painting which Synthetism and Cloisonnism represented, involving the embrace of simplicity, intuition, flatness, and emotion-led form and color, can be seen in many subsequent art movements. The emergence of Expressionism in northern Europe, for example, indicated a pronounced kind of investment in the emotional and spiritual content of the external world as it appeared to the individual mind. This development is hard to imagine without the prior example of Gauguin and other painters connected to the Synthetist and Cloisonnist milieu.