"Perfection of this modeling; modeling in high-relief. This leads from the first academy of the Caracchi to our decadence."
Emile Bernard holds a contrary opinion. His view was originally published in the Mercure de France and reasserted in his preface to the letters written to him by Van Gogh.[3] Bernard, who revolted from the Atelier Cormon with Anquetin, had, as we have seen, been repulsed by Gauguin in in 1886. After a brief return to Paris he went off to Saint-Briac, where he covered the walls of the inn with frescoes and painted the windows, in imitation of stained-glass, employing essence of turpentine as a medium. In 1888, before Gauguin came to Arles, Bernard was brought into contact with him again through the mediation of Theodore Van Gogh and, although young enough to be Gauguin's son (being about twenty at this time), shared with him the honors of the Volpini exhibition.
Bernard claims that he, and he alone, invented Syntheticism, and bases his claim on the evidence of the pictures (all dated) which Gauguin painted previous to 1888, and in which Gauguin was still definitely Impressionist in technique. He maintains that Gauguin abruptly changed his style after the second meeting in 1888, when he first saw what his younger rival had been doing. Furthermore, Bernard contends that this style was solely based upon the application of Cézanne's discoveries in technique.
Against these contentions there are three objections to be made.
In the first place it is known that Gauguin, during his stay in Martinique in 1887, painted pictures that are undeniably essays in syntheticism. Martinique showed Gauguin the impossibility of painting tropic sunlight by means of the Impressionistic division of tones. Always purely intuitive as an artist, Gauguin began to realize at Martinique, however vaguely, that one cannot reproduce the natural decomposition of light by the artificial decomposition of color attempted by Pissarro and the other Impressionists. He therefore sought to translate sunlight into color by simplifying and exaggerating the contrast of colors.
In the second place, Bernard's argument leaves unexplained why it was not he, but Gauguin, who after 1888 painted those magnificent pictures Le Christ Jaune, Le Christ Vert and La Vision après le Sermon[4] and carved the two superb bas-reliefs Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses. Moreover, the careful reader of Van Gogh's letters to his brother will find that throughout '88 and '89 Bernard stood in relation to Gauguin as a pupil to a master. Finally, even if Bernard's contention be partially true and if his own essays did induce Gauguin to reject the last vestiges of Impressionism, his story fails to account for the masterly grasp of Synthetic Symbolism shown by Gauguin immediately after their second meeting.
It is quite impossible to trace to Cézanne's essays in Synthetic Impressionism the more severely linear and decorative design of either Bernard or Gauguin. Cézanne, later on, even went so far as to assert that Gauguin had misunderstood him. Therefore it is clear that the opinions of A.S. Hartrick and of Maurice Denis better fit the facts. Gauguin was the sole originator of the Synthetic style. That style was derived, perhaps mainly, from the careful study of thirteenth century glass, which does perfectly what Gauguin wished to do: translate the effect of sunlight into luminous color. But it was also derived from Egyptian painting, Byzantine mosaics and the Kakemonos of the Japanese. In short, it was as complete a rejection of Impressionism as possible and a return to the linear arabesque and decorative spacing of balanced color and form practiced by the primitives of all times and preserved, in the nineteenth century, in the works of artists whom Gauguin admired: Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas.
[1] "Post-Impressionism," by A.S. Hartrick. Imprint, May, 1913.
[2] Paris, l'Occident, 1912.
[3] Paris, Vollard, 1911.