Gauguin Before Gauguin

Through half a century Paul Gauguin has become increasingly famous as a painter of genius who invented a unique style. In that same period Emile Bernard has languished in the shadow as a second-rate symbolist. But back in the 1880s it was Bernard, at 20, just half Gauguin's age, who led the older man beyond impressionism and guided him toward the style that now defines him. Bernard was painting like Gauguin before Gauguin himself.

Evidence of the origin of Gauguin's style was on exhibition last week in Manhattan's new Hirschl & Adler Galleries, the first time Bernard has ever had a one-man show in the U.S. With 31 paintings and some 20 watercolors and drawings of his Pont-Aven period (1886-93), it is also the biggest show he has ever had anywhere.

An Unknown Named Van Gogh. Bernard's role was never fully appreciated until Art Historian John Rewald told the story last autumn in his authoritative Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin. In the late 1880s Gauguin was painting in the Breton village of Pont-Aven along impressionist lines. Bernard was a precocious, rebellious, perceptive intellectual. He used to go on painting jaunts outside Paris with another unknown named Vincent van Gogh, who thought well of Bernard's work. Van Gogh urged Bernard to see Gauguin, who had once rebuffed him, and the young painter went to Pont-Aven in early August 1888 equipped with the latest avant-garde notions from the capital plus some theories of his own and the ability to expound them all brilliantly. He was working away from impressionistic effects on canvas toward a symbolism in which simplified forms would forcefully and expressively convey the meaning of the objects they symbolized.

Though not nearly so talented as Gauguin, Bernard was much more articulate. Young Bernard's theories fired the older painter's imagination, prodded him to formulate his own ideas, and drove him to experiment on canvas. The two friends painted together at Pont-Aven, feverishly discussed their daily discoveries. That summer Gauguin made the major stylistic break of his life, began painting in the style that was to make him famous.

"You Are a Traitor." The break between Gauguin and Bernard came when Gauguin proclaimed himself, in Bernard's words, "the chief of the symbolist school in painting," and Bernard felt that he had been betrayed. Years after the event Bernard recalled that his indignant sister tackled Gauguin in the middle of an auction room. "Monsieur Gauguin," she cried, "you are a traitor. You have violated your pledge and are doing the greatest harm to my brother, who has been the true initiator of the art which you now claim for yourself." According to Bernard, "Gauguin did not answer, and withdrew."

Gauguin kept going toward the unknown and soared to fame--posthumously. Bernard, becoming enamored of Italian Renaissance masters, and veering toward mysticism, turned back toward safer paths and sank to obscurity. Though he lived to a ripe 72 (and was a key figure in bringing Van Gogh's work to public attention), Bernard never again painted with the vigor and originality of the Pont-Aven days, which ended half a century before his death in 1941.

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