Bernard GANTNER (1928-2018) - Snow in Franche-Comté 1992

Bernard GANTNER (1928-2018)
Snow in Franche-Comté 1992
Oil on canvas, sbd
97x146cm

Born August 16, 1928 in Belfort, died June 1, 2018. Painter of landscapes, snow, still lifes, gouache painter, watercolorist, engraver, illustrator. Bernard Gantner is an accomplished artist of international renown.
At a very young age, he showed an interest in the arts. Encouraged by the curator of the Belfort Museum, he decided at ten years old to devote his life to painting.
In 1961 he won the “Prix de la Critique” awarded by his friend the famous writer and critic Claude Roger-Marx. Bernard Gantner then embarked on the start of an international career. " Fifty personal exhibitions in Japan, sixty in the United States, around ten in Canada, exhibitions in England and in all major cities in France. Retrospectives at the Château de Val, Baume-les-Dames Abbey, Musée Florival in Guebwiller, Mulhouse , Strasbourg, Vittel, Chicago, Basel, Tokyo. Numerous purchases by museums in France and abroad."
In 1998 he was awarded the Legion of Honor. He opened the Gantner Space in Bourogne and made a donation of his lithographic work: more than 550 lithographs as well as etchings; he illustrated, among others, the tales of Maupassant, the poems of E.Verhaeren and published around ten bibliophile books, often with the collaboration of Claude Roger-Marx.
After living on the banks of Lake Geneva, Bernard Gantner returned to his native region where he devotes his time to his art, his museum as well as to the beautification of the surrounding gardens which he transforms and designs himself.
He finds his inspiration in the landscapes that surround him, constantly chasing snow, water and vegetation in all their forms in all seasons, preferring old snow-covered farms against a backdrop of fir trees in the Vosges and Haute-Savoie.
The place of Bernard Gantner in the continuum of the French landscape
Corot, in a notebook from 1856, encourages us to let ourselves be guided by emotion alone; he suggests that we abandon ourselves to a first impression upon seeing a site or an object. He is convinced that if we are truly 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 art collectors. We find traces of French landscape painters in many works by contemporary artists. Bernard Gantner has few rivals when it comes to his devotion to his nation's artistic past.
The Vosges and the surroundings of his native district, Franche-Comté, are for Gantner what the forests and fields surrounding Fontainebleau were for Corot, Millet, Rousseau and other artists of the Barbizon school, and what the suburbs of Paris for the impressionists.
For Pissarro, it was Pontoise, for Van Gogh, Arles; for Monet, Giverny and Argenteuil, and for Alfred Sisley, Louveciennes. Gantner's world is in Alsace, 500 kilometers east of Paris. Alsace, because of its distance from major centers, represents a rural environment which belongs more to the 18th and 19th centuries than to the present.
The farm where Gantner lives is remote and surrounded by hills and dales, birches, aspens and fruit trees, meadows and ponds. To get to the nearest village, Gantner walks along narrow dirt roads, passing rustic cottages, old barns and farmyards populated with chickens, roosters, ducks and geese.
Through his drawings, watercolors, paintings and lithographs, Gantner captured the unchanging qualities of this natural world. He always used the open-air method developed by the Barbizon artists. Its presence in nature is familiar; he can be found walking with his portable chair and sketchbook on the trails, on the banks, and in the fields surrounding his house. In his glass studio overlooking a garden and the surrounding forest, he reproduces the colors, light and impressions of the outdoor scenes that he sketched in black and white. These drawings are the basis of his watercolors and oil paintings.
Gantner combines the sensitivity of the Barbizon painters for the French landscape with the abstract play of colors of the Impressionist painters. It combines the abstraction of the sky, clouds or a path with the exquisite detail of a shaking branch or the inclined window sill. While strongly inspired by French tradition, Gantner's work offers a refreshing interpretation and a unique vision of nature.
Through his drawings, watercolors, lithographs and oils, Gantner translates his appreciation of the sky, water, trees and old farms so that others, like him, become one with nature that he loves so much.

Lawrence Kreisman
Historian of art and architecture
Excerpt from Gantner, A Life in the country
Editions Buschlen Mowatt, 19