Mystery masterpiece’s journey involved Healdsburg company
The hidden masterwork by a seminal post-Impressionist French painter was in need of restoration and had not been seen in public for eight decades.
Its journey through Europe, New York and Los Angeles for authentication and restoration also included critically important work by an internationally known Healdsburg art support system company.
Émile Henri Bernard’s “The Passion of Jesus Christ” hasn’t been displayed publicly since at least 1941 when the artist’s Paris studio and paintings were evacuated before the onrushing Nazi army occupied the French capital.
The wait will be longer. The painting is in a vault in France. It will be shown in the U.S. on a yet-to-be determined date.
The story of how an early 1900s unsigned painting by Bernard - a friend and contemporary of van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec - involved the John Annesley Company in Healdsburg is part of a history mystery of art dealers on two continents, years of painstaking restoring and $400,000 in authentication and restoration costs.
The large painting depicting Christ on the cross -?9½ feet tall and 6 feet wide - had been folded and was in dire need of restoration when it came to the attention in 2000 of William F. Chamberlain, a southern California technology and software development company founder who became an unlikely Oakland art dealer.
Chamberlain consigned the John Annesley Company to create new stretchers for the painting. Founder John Annesley had died in October, so the challenge of working on Bernard’s “Passion” fell to Chris McKee, a Sonoma State University art degree graduate who’d been with the company seven years.
Lodged in aged outbuildings on the east side of the Russian River off Bailhache Avenue in Healdsburg, the company’s outside look belies its status in the art world. More than a half-century old, its stretcher bars and panels have been used by museums and restoration experts worldwide to retrofit works by Picasso, Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh and others.
McKee was in charge of the three-person team that?traveled to an Emeryville warehouse to build new stretchers for the painting and to professionally stretch it.
Work on the heavy beeswax-lined canvas was done in a heat-controlled warehouse during 12-hour workdays, and then it was stretched again. It took 336 hours by McKee and two others to stretch the canvas completely to eliminate any slack in the painting.
“It was amazing, a big giant piece that took up almost the whole [warehouse] space,” said McKee, 33. “It was a piece like you see in a museum.”
The artist and his painting
Bernard’s friendships with Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh are well-chronicled. Known for his development of Cloisonnism and Synthetism styles, he was eccentric, egotistical and known as a character. He was also a writer, critic and essayist, whose adventures in brothels not only distracted him from his work but also conflicted with his marriages and study of religious philosophy and mysticism.
Born in 1868, he and Gauguin are credited with starting the Pont-Aven school, a group of young painters who espoused the style known as Synthetism at Pont-Aven, Brittany, France, in the late 1880s.
He later traveled through Egypt, Spain and Italy before returning to Paris in 1904 and later painting “The Passion of Jesus Christ,” likely beginning about 1920.
He left the painting unsigned, possibly following the medieval tradition of not signing artwork to keep the focus on God’s glory.
Chamberlain first became involved through his relationship with Uno Vallman,a Swedish painter and art dealer who bought the painting from the Stockholm Morgan Gallery in the 1950s.
According to Vallman, the painting was damaged while being transported and concealed from the Nazis. Chamberlain met Vallman in 1996, helped him sell a Gauguin sculpture and then after Vallman died continued working for his nephew, Leif Wallman.
The unsigned painting’s authentication was in question.
Chamberlain started his quest to authenticate it in 2000, and it took 11 years to authenticate the piece fully. The process included ultraviolet light review at the Swedish Government Forensics Laboratory in 2001 that showed there was no other painting underneath it.
A review and analysis of the painting was conducted by restoration and Bernard expert France Bonnimond-Dumon at the Louvre along with Bernard’s granddaughter, Dr. Lorédana Harscoet-Marie, confirmed the authenticity.
In 2011, under the auspices of his Pacific Arts Collection art business, Chamberlain hired art historian and restoration expert Aiqin Zhou to undertake the work the painting needed.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: