Pont-Aven School

Pont-Aven School (French: École de Pont-Aven) covers the art produced by the artists' colony around the Breton town of Pont-Aven, which emerged in the 1850s and lasted into the early twentieth century. Painters came for the cheap, picturesque countryside and a way out of Academic formulas and fading Impressionism, drawn by Brittany's traditional dress, fervent Catholicism and granite calvaries. The decisive moment came when Paul Gauguin arrived in 1886; with Émile Bernard he developed Synthetism in 1888, replacing faithful description with bold pure colour, flat forms bounded by dark contours, and subjects drawn from memory, feeling and Symbolist meaning. In 1889 Gauguin moved to nearby Le Pouldu with Meijer de Haan, Charles Filiger and Paul Sérusier, and the circle's cloisonnist style - in which the artist 'synthesizes' subject, memory and design - became a hinge between Impressionism and early modernism.

Defining characteristics

• Bold, pure colour applied flat in decorative areas rather than modeled tones
• Flat forms separated by dark outlines (cloisonnism), with little or no shading
• Absence of traditional perspective: compressed, flattened pictorial space
• Simplified, geometrized composition stripped of unnecessary detail
• Images reconstructed from memory and feeling rather than painted from direct observation
• Symbolist subject matter: Breton piety, ritual and landscape treated as mood

Key figures

• Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) — Led the circle from 1886 and codified Synthetism (Vision After the Sermon)
• Émile Bernard (1868-1941) — Younger innovator who claimed the first Synthetist approach (The Pardon, 1888)
• Paul Sérusier (1864-1927) — Visitor at Le Pouldu whose Talisman landscape spread the school's ideas to the Nabis
• Meijer de Haan (1852-1895) — Dutch painter who worked closely with Gauguin at Le Pouldu

Example works

• Vision After the Sermon — Paul Gauguin (1888)
• The Talisman — Paul Sérusier (1888)
• The Pardon — Émile Bernard (1888)

Sources

• Pont-Aven School - Wikipedia encyclopedia
• Synthetism - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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