Quayside Gallery

Original paintings by Armand Berthe

If a film could be made about the life of Armand Berthe, it would be as interesting and vibrant as the man and his paintings. For indeed, his colourful and extraordinary life is mirrored in his work: it reflects the episodes that have affected him, his state of mind and the external influences which have merged to establish a man who combines the soul of the poet with the vision of the artist. And behind it all is a driving force – the pursuit of perfection.

In this pursuit he combines the artistic elements of talent, technique and training with the worldly challenges of art, science, literature, religion, mathematics and world events. Art becomes science when analysis is necessary to discover the elements that hinder progress. This requires dedication, self-examination and honesty.  The quest for perfection has suddenly become harder. But where the scientist seeks the one, pure, perfect solution, the artist’s task takes him beyond that – to strive for the sublime marriage of all the elements he needs to integrate in as clear a form as possible. The artist, above all, has the potential to be the perfect communicator, provoking emotion, passion, contemplation, anger, intellectual stimulation, joie-de -vivre, calm, and debate, often from just a few seconds of visual imagery.

We want our artists to have lived interesting lives. We want pain, anguish, jubilation and soul-searching. We do not want them to have lived all their lives in the sunshine, nor indeed in the shade. We want chiaroscuro. And we do not want artists who shy away from the challenge of striving to improve – for even though their technique may be admirable, they become formulaic, predictable and contented if they do not seek something greater than themselves. For them the public knows what to expect and everyone is comfortable. Paintings become wallpaper. The curse of the committed artist is that he never achieves the satisfaction he seeks in the pursuit of perfection.

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Armand Berthe was born in 1925 in Alexandria, Egypt, to a French father who was, at the time of Berthe’s birth, working as an engineer on the Suez Canal, and an English mother. Later, the family moved to Marseille where Berthe was educated by Jesuits. In 1942 they moved to Alès in the Cévennes region of France where Berthe worked  in the coal mines of the area for two years. It was war-time, and he joined the Foreign Legion (La Légion étrangère) and ended up fighting on the front line at Colmar in Alsace in the winter of 1944.  Berthe was wounded seriously by machine-gun fire. Admitted to the Val-de-Grasse military hospital in Paris on 18th December 1944, he was to take eighteen months to recover. He was nineteen years of age.

His quest for perfection had already started, but in the field of writing. Like the capable and talented pianist who has the wisdom to realise that he will never become a true virtuoso, Berthe fortunately realised at a young age that words alone would never be enough for him to fulfil his dream.  But here, in the military hospital, forced inactivity during recovery allowed him to experiment with a different medium of expression – painting. 

After he was discharged from hospital, the war was over and Berthe needed to make a living. Following work in an office, which he found ‘terrible’, he spent two years as a shepherd in the Pyrenees. He was back to the solitude which has continued to be a strong need in him, allowing him to contemplate and draw, to re-energise his creative forces. This period of his life also confirmed in him the desire to devote his future to art, so in 1950 he enrolled at l’école des Beaux-Arts in Rennes

In 1953, the course ended, and Berthe entered his ‘grey period’. His paintings of fishing ports, Breton landscapes and dark skied seascapes were draped in a mysterious veil of grey, which blurred horizons and enveloped the canvas. It was a dramatic and emotional start to a career in painting that continued to develop over the next fifty years. 

He returned to the Cévennes the following year, living for a time at St Félix de Palières in an isolated farmhouse. He had regained contact with an old friend, Paul Courtin, with whom he exchanged many fruitful ideas, and his work emerged from the grey into the pastoral, a productive period of paintings of rural scenes of haystacks and harvests, fields and country life. He moved back to Marseille, by which time his paintings had become an historical portrait of French life, using strong, dense light, half-light, deep shade - images of rays of light pouring through half-open shutters probing the secrets of the interior life of a house – half-tints impregnated onto the canvas. He began to sell seriously. In 1956 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the town of Marseille and was the Guest of Honour at the Menton Biennale.

Berthe took up residence in the Alpes de Haute-Provence at Manosque. In the 1950s this was the haunt of many artists and writers, among whom was Jean Giono, the great French novelist, poet and playwright, who was born there. Berthe and Giono had a sympathetic understanding of each other’s work and spent many evenings discussing art and literature. Giono’s  themes were in harmony with Berthe’s own mentality.  During this time in the Luberon his work became even more productive: his enthusiasm for the terrain, the landscapes of the high plateau, the oaks and conifers, and the valley of the Durance river  encouraged over 600 paintings. At this time he continued to participate in exhibitions and was awarded the Diplôme d’Honneur de l’Art Libre (Paris) in 1957.

In 1963 he moved to Paris. He began by working on the restoration of historic monuments and frescos.  His qualifications from Rennes enabled him to take up work at the Musée de Louvre, where he began his fascinating work on historical objects and paintings. He restored frescos from Fayoum, in Egypt. These were 2000 year-old portraits of the occupants of the graves there – a delicate and detailed restoration which formed a creative circle to return him spiritually to the land of his birth.

Once again, the need arose for solitude to regain his mental equilibrium, to question himself and to recover a balance.  He opted for a retreat at Solesmes, a Benedictine monastery near Sablé in north-west France, which has attracted numerous intellectuals, poets, artists and scientists. It was an ideal place for Berthe to reflect and relax. The poet Pierre Reverdy, often referred to as a Cubist Poet, spent time there. There are parallels here with Berthe’s quest; there is a rigorous architecture to cubist poetry, which forms a cradle for the deliberate dissociation and subsequent recombination of elements to form a new artistic entity. While we may not regard Berthe’s work as Cubist at this point, his later work, the figurative style, the abstracts and collages created in the late 1990s and early in 2000 certainly remind us of this structure.

In 1967 he returned to Paris, where the Louvre welcomed him for a second time. His experience and responsibilities increased: he had restored works by Cézanne and Rousseau, and performed a delicate restoration of  Dali’s large oil painting ‘La pêche aux thons’  - ‘Tuna Fishing’ - which he executed with success. At the Louvre he had the opportunity to study the great works, the master painters. At this time he had a particular fascination with the work of the Florentine artist Paolo Uccello (1397-1495) and especially his extraordinary painting ‘Batalla de St Romano.’ This is the third panel of the Battle of San Romano, the first being at the National  Gallery in London, and the second at the Uffizi in Florence.  Berthe’s admiration of the innovative perspective, its impeccable execution, the paradoxes within the work (particularly with the mixture of formal beauty and a willingness to show brutality), the complex geometry which underlies it, and the contrasts between the elements of fantasy and reality tell us a lot about the complex melange of ideas and disciplines that Berthe finds so appealing. 

By the year 1970, Berthe has worked in the restoration of ceramic and bronze antiquities and by 1980 he was Head of the Restoration studio for objets d’art at the Louvre and an accredited restorer of paintings. He taught painting restoration to students and had been privileged to work on some of the greatest works of art in the Louvre.

He retired from the Louvre after 25 years and returned to the Cévennes, buying an old farmhouse which he restored with the sort of exceptional taste we would expect. Again he was back to solitude, and he remained there for over a decade, painting vibrant, figurative works, but travelling widely across Europe, India, and Thailand, which provided inspiration for the canvases that remain quintessentially French, while capturing entirely the spirit of the country he was visiting.  Unlike Gauguin or Pissarro, who both travelled abroad because they were against ‘civilisation’, Berthe journeyed precisely in order to embrace the intimacy of other cultures while maintaining the influence of his own upon the resulting works. The colours, atmosphere and even smell of these places are evoked by his canvases of this period.

Now, he has a wonderful apartment in Alès with a huge, bright studio.   He is experimenting more: exploring monotones and line forms in his etchings and deploying his astonishing grasp of colour and structure in his abstracts. Even now, at 80 years of age, he is demonstrating his desire to push his own boundaries and technique.

Which brings us back to the Uccello.  Berthe is still deconstructing and constructing perspectives, applying framework and geometry, imposing discipline on his works. One of the reasons that he must have been so obsessed by the Uccello, which Picasso must surely also have observed prior to his Guernica, is that in Florence in about 1455, Uccello invented Cubism.

Linda Saunders, St Victor de Malcap, April 2005

Early works in private collections

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