Émile Bernard

Émile Henri Bernard was born on 28 April 1868 in France and by his late teens was already experimenting with the techniques that would become Cloisonnism and Synthetism: hard edges, unmodulated color, a deliberate flatness that broke from the light-chasing of the Impressionists. Between 1886 and 1897 he worked closely with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Eugène Boch, and later Paul Cézanne, forming friendships that placed him at the center of Post-Impressionism's most volatile years. But his best work came early, and after 1897 the momentum drained; he turned increasingly to writing - plays, poetry, art criticism, first-hand accounts of the movement he'd helped shape. He died on 16 April 1941, twelve days shy of seventy-three, remembered more as a witness to genius than as one himself.