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Born in a country surrounded by mountains whose charm and austerity during winters can last for months, living all year long in communion with the same sky, the same horizons, Bernard Gantner resembles in many ways the Masters of Barbizon who favored reflection to frenzy, woods and the countryside to cities, and who felt that being part of nature was perhaps the best way of penetrating into oneself. Through his modesty and discretion, however, Gantner differs fundamentally from Courbet, the painter of the Loue valley, to whom I will compare him to - Belfort being not far from Ornans (Courbet's home). The landscape of his birthplace never ceased to inspire him through its infinite changes in its forms and light throughout the year.
Gantner is one of those who have secretly favored seasons when nature is at its harshest, when it offers artists the most perilous subjects through its luxuriance, its incoherence, its whims, its transformations.
The first virtue of any Work of Art that can be classified as such, is where
landscape, in its best moments, is barred from the artist who Corot
called the great « tapageur » (extravagant colorist), and unfolds
gradually with a closeness of tones, unobtrusively uniting its qualities,
letting the trees, freed of their restraining folliage, powerfully
stretch their majestic branches into the sky revealing their frail
twigs as witnesses of a continuous effort.
Earth never appears as pathetic as when it bares its face to seedlings.
It is when the houses of a village seem to be huddled together tightly
like a herd to protect against the cold that they are the most touching.
Let color keep quiet, and we will finally find silence.
Endowed with a silence that we rarely find these days, Gantner's oils and watercolors are all devoid of figuration. Conceived in solitude, they invite us to share without destroying. Precise but without dryness, they require that the color remains the servant of drawing and that the hand obeys the feeling more than the reasoning reason whose tyranny is less frightening than that of virtuosity.
All human activity is suspended. No step spoils the virginity of the aimless path; no game crosses the meadows; no hunter, whose presence would menace the sky, hides in the forest. The wood workers even ceased their labor. Reduced to a passive calm, Nature waits. It is a whole series of variations of silence which is proposed to us.
Gantner, we said already, was not tempted to introduce man or animal
into these symphonies in white, (like Whistler would have called
them). Everything, however, talks to us about mankind, the cold
against which he struggles, the inaction to which he is condemned,
or still more amazing, the wonder one feels seeing the naked branch
decorating itself with a simulacrum of buds, water competing in
solidity with earth, and the soil itself becoming source of light
without the sun, as though our planet, isolated from the rest of
the world, was from now on to be self-sufficient.
Yes, Gantner suggests that there is wealth in this monotony, to some extent implying the touch of gold, of azure or crimson which remains associated with the prisms of ice, to the endless plains, to the celestial depths.
Claude Roger-Marx, 1966
Extracts of Snows
The place of Bernard Gantner in the continuum of French landscape
In a note-book of 1856, Corot, encourages us to be guided by emotion alone; he suggests to abandon oneself to a first impression at the sight of a place or an object. He is convinced that if one is really emotionally touched, it will then be possible for us to share the sincerity of our emotions with others.
Nature continues to enchant and inspire artists and collectors of art. One finds in many works of contemporary artists the trace of the French landscape painters. Bernard Gantner hardly has a rival concerning his devotion for the artistic past of his nation.
The Vosges region and the surroundings of his native region, the Franche-Comté, are for Gantner what the forests and the fields surrounding Fontainebleau were for Corot, Millet, Rousseau and other artists of the school of Barbizon, and what the suburbs of Paris were for the Impressionists.
For Pissarro, it was Pontoise, for Van Gogh, Arles; for Monet,
Giverny and Argenteuil, and for, Alfred Sisley, Louveciennes. The
world of Gantner is in Alsace, 500 kilometers east of Paris. Because
of its distance from the great centers, Alsace, offers a rural landscape
that belongs more to the 18th and 19th centuries than to the present.
The farm where Gantner lives is in this remote countryside is surrounded
by hills and small valleys, birches, aspens and fruit trees, meadows
and ponds. To go to the village nearby, Gantner walks along narrow
dirt roads, passing the rustic thatched cottages, old barns and
poultry farms filled with chicken, roosters, ducks and geese.
Through his drawings, watercolours, paintings and lithographies,
Gantner reproduces the unchanging qualities of this natural world.
He always used the technique of painting outdoors chosen by the
artists of Barbizon. He is a familiar presence in nature; one can
meet him walking with his folding chair and his sketch book along
paths, on river banks, and in the fields surrounding his home. In
his window-pannelled studio leading to a garden and the neighbouring
forest, he reproduces the colors, the light and the impressions
of the outdoor scenes he sketched in black and white. These sketches
are the foundation for his watercolours and oils.
Gantner combines the sensitivity of the painters of Barbizon for the French
landscape with the abstract play of colors of the Impressionist
painters. He blends the abstraction of the sky, the clouds or a
path, with the exquisite detail of a trembling branch, or an inclined
window frame. While being strongly inspired by the French tradition,
the work of Gantner offers a refreshing interpretation and a unique
vision of nature.
Through his drawings, watercolours, lithographies and oils, Gantner
displays his gratitude for the sky, the water, the trees and the
old farms, so that others, like himself, become one with nature
which he loves so much.
Lawrence Kreisman
Historian of art and architecture
Extract of Gantner, A Life in the country
Editions Buschlen Mowatt, 1989
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