Pont-Aven School

Pont-Aven school, group of young painters who espoused the style known as Synthetism and united under Paul Gauguin’s informal tutelage at Pont-Aven, Brittany, France, in the summer of 1888. The artists included Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Paul Sérusier, Charles Filiger, Meyer de Haan, Armand Séguin, and Henri de Chamaillard.

Gauguin and Bernard were the first to reject Impressionist and pointillist techniques in favour of Synthetist methods. The paintings executed by these artists in the years between 1886, when they first met at Pont-Aven, and 1888 show an overall simplification, a highly expressive use of colour, and an intensely spiritual approach to their subject matter. In their Breton landscapes, Gauguin and Bernard employed bright areas of colour surrounded with heavy, dark outlines that give the painted surface the appearance of medieval enamel and stained-glass work. The content of their paintings often derived from the everyday life of the Breton people.

Gauguin’s disciples, enthusiastically accepting his advice not to paint exclusively from nature, gradually abandoned the Neo-Impressionist styles that they had adopted in Paris. In their revolt against naturalism, the early Synthetist painters emphasized the decorative potentials of colour and line: a painting was to be primarily a flat surface upon which colour was laid ornamentally. Landscape at the Bois d’Amour at Pont-Aven, or The Talisman (1888), painted by Paul Sérusier under the direct guidance of Gauguin, became the talisman of the young disciples. Gauguin had instructed Sérusier not only to paint the landscape from memory but to be certain to paint the different-coloured areas as intensely as possible. Upon the return of the Pont-Aven school to Paris in the fall of 1888, the members met regularly to discuss new developments in French art, particularly Symbolism. In 1889 Gauguin arranged an important exhibition of Impressionist and Synthetist art that featured his own and others’ works.

At one point in the existence of the Pont-Aven school, the idea of an artistic and communal society had seemed feasible, but, once Gauguin left for Tahiti, members of the original group abandoned their hopes for this to materialize. These artists became increasingly involved in the development of Symbolist art theories and techniques. Artists such as Sérusier eventually became active in the Académie Julian and in the group of artists known as the Nabis.