In the workshop, where classes began again, Lautrec sang Bruyan’s verses in all his throat. The disagreements between Cormon and his disciples intensified. A riot was ripe. Some students, led by Emil Bernard, a thin young man with disheveled hair who came from Lille and entered the studio just a year ago, frankly criticized Cormon for “the school method of painting the picture.” Bernard called everyone to revolt. “What we are taught is not based on anything,” he categorically declared, “Cormon?” The impostor, not the artist, “continued Bernard.” After all, how does he teach? “He sits one by one next to each student and one adjusts his hand in the drawing, at the other head, at the third – a breast, without any logic explaining, that here he supposedly sees this model so and therefore you too should see the same…
When Bernard appeared in the workshop, Lautrec, Anketin and Tampia immediately became friends with him. They took him to the Louvre to show the canvases of Velasquez, the drawings of Michelangelo and Luke Signorelli; they took him to the street Laffitte, to the gallery of Durand-Ruel, and acquainted with the works of the Impressionists. Bernard, being a man impulsive and alive, immediately joined the innovators. Together with his friends, he watched the works of a certain Cezanne, who kept in his narrow shop on Closel Street, in the lower part of Montmartre, a poor paint merchant, papa Tanguy, and immediately declared that Cezanne was the largest contemporary artist. Although Bernard was introduced into the world of artists by the talkative Tampier and his friends, he very quickly gained authority among them. Well-read, sociable, with a lively and inquisitive mind, he easily understood various theories, developed them,
His judgments were peremptory, and he backed them with thousands of arguments. Glory, genius – these are his favorite words. Art was sacred to him, and to his vocation, to which he gave himself all in defiance of the will of his parents, he treated as a consecration in the church order. The way from Anjera, where he lived, went to Paris Bernard on foot and nevertheless always came to the workshop first. He was religious, even prone to mysticism, hated the atmosphere of Cormon’s workshop; rude and vulgar conversations that were conducted there, cut his ear. “As if they insult you,” he said.
One evening Anketen persuaded Bernard to go to “MyLeaton”, and he left there “in horror”, with disgust for the “unhealthy psychosis” that reigned there. Lautrec did not really listen to what Bernard was saying. Much more interested in his friend’s face. He asked Bernard to pose for him. For twenty sessions he painted a magnificent portrait of Bernard, subtly transferring the artist’s psychology, his serious and irreconcilable character, the resolute look of his small, slightly slanted eyes. Lautrec was not easily given this portrait. He could not “successfully reconcile the background color with the face”.
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