Self-Portrait

Émile Bernard's Self-Portrait (1888) was made in the crucial year of his Synthetist breakthrough — painted when he was 20 years old and at the height of his most productive period. Bernard's self-portraits of this period show a young man intensely focused on the formal problems he was working through — the simplified planes, bold outlines, and flat color areas that would define Cloisonnism. His self-examination in paint was both documentary and experimental: the face as subject for the new formal language he was developing, the self-portrait as test case for Synthetism.

Bernard applies his developing Synthetist approach to the self-portrait: the face is rendered in areas of color bounded by dark outlines rather than in conventional tonal modeling. The flat treatment of the features — reduced to their essential shapes and colors — is consistent with the cloisonniste principles he was articulating simultaneously in theoretical writings. His palette is simplified: specific flesh tones, the colors of background and clothing, without the gradual tonal transitions of academic portrait technique.