*** Welcome to piglix ***

Francis Bernard (artist)


Francis Bernard born in Paris in 1928 is a painter, a multimedia artist and the author of textimages.

Francis Bernard was born in Paris in 1928 and brought up with heroic tales of the Poilu (the French infantrymen of the First World War). He was, therefore, left distraught that by the French defeat of 1940 - the heroes of Verdun had become the vanquished. To forget the war or at least to hide its memory, Francis Bernard took refuge in books. These were rare in the family library, so he even stole a complete edition of Homer's poems from the Jesuit college where he was educated. Ulysse became his hero · .

The importance of line and color already became essential to him in his childhood, through the pages of a two-volume dictionary of mythology, one of the few books in the family home. Plates of statues from a Berlin museum illustrate the book. All are line engraved and this technique would influence the artist throughout his life. At the end of the war, Bernard became enthused by color and visited every gallery in the Latin Quarter. It is during these visits that he determines to become a painter. The father of a friend, knowing his passion for painting offers him his first box of oil paints and a period of copying works from the impressionist period commences. He spends a year in the studio of André Lhote, whose "Treatise on Figure" and a "Treatise on Landscape" he had read. Lhote highlights the underlying geometric lines on which a work depends and this will become a lifelong guiding principle to the artist · .

As a multimedia artist, Francis Bernard expresses himself on the website « Polychromies ».

In 1974, Francis Bernard exhibits work at the Swedish Cultural Center in Paris: a polychromatic sculpture on the occasion of an exhibition of works from the Salvador Allende Museum, Santiago, Chile.

A few years later, Francis Bernard undertakes a graphic transcription of « AMERICA » a poem by Michèle Lalonde from Quebec. Presented as billboards, this work will be shown in Montreal, as well as in the Luxembourg museum in Paris in December 1980.

In 1981, Francis Bernard creates a graphic series based on the character Père Duchesne. This will be shown for two months at the Centre Pompidou. The series is a collection of 150 drawings and paintings and constitutes the « Théâtre pictural du Père Duchesne ». It is inspired by the Jean-Pierre Faye play, Les dernières journées du père Duchesne, which uses historical material from the revolutionary newspaper« Le Père Duchesne ». Twenty two panels of this series are also presented at the French-Italian Cultural Center, during the biennial Venice carnival on the theme "The masks of Marat".


...
Wikipedia

...