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.

Three years later, Jean-Jacques Luthi added the painting to the official catalogue of Bernard’s work as No. 1690, “La Passion de Jésus-Christ - 1935.”

Restoring a masterpiece

Zhou’s first job was to clean the painting and remove an inexpert restoration undertaken in the 1970s. Zhou’s work recreated the painting rather than repairing and restoring it. Wallman insisted she use the brand of paint used by Bernard and that the work “complements the skills evidenced in the original artist.”

“I studied the artist’s life and why he created this painting,” Zhou says on the Pacific Arts Collection website. “The fact that so many different styles [were used] over the course of Bernard’s artistic career made it important for me to study all of [these] styles.”

She did a cleaning using a special cleaner and a lightly dampened soft sponge to remove the accumulated grime and deeper layers of dirt.

Using extensive research to determine the colors originally used by Bernard, Zhou used about 80 colors of the highest quality, similar to what had been used by Bernard, mixing them to match the original colors.

After drying for six months, she varnished the painting.

According to Neil McWilliam, an expert in 19th and early 20th century French art and visual culture, and Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Bernard’s early works, “particularly that produced at Pont-Aven after 1886, is highly valued.”

In an email interview, McWilliam said Bernard’s subsequent work underwent major changes, influenced by the Renaissance masters.

This phase of his career attracted limited interest until 2014. At that point, “a retrospective exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris has begun to encourage a re-evaluation.”

McWilliam published a critical edition of Bernard’s letters in 2012: “Emile Bernard: Les lettres d’un artiste (1884-1941)”and in the same year organized an exhibition “Emile Bernard. Au-delà de Pont-Aven,” at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris.

In his email, McWilliam said, “Bill Chamberlain’s painting is an important contribution to this process.”

The painting’s future

Chamberlain is currently working on a documentary about Bernard, and bringing “The Passion of Jesus Christ” to the public. He has spent about $400,000 in restoration and authentication, although the painting belongs to Leif Wallman’s widow.

Chamberlain, 75, was coy when asked about his potential windfall if the painting were to be sold. He reiterated his primary concern was showing it to the public, and getting compensation for Wallman’s widow. McWilliam, Chamberlain and other art experts contacted all declined to estimate the value of “The Passion of Jesus Christ.”

“I want to keep the promises I made to Leif when I was in France,” Chamberlain said. “I also want to create awareness of Émile Bernard and to show [this painting] to the world.”

For McKee at the John Annesley Company, the experience working on Bernard’s work was “impressive,” particularly the “honeylike” beeswax lining. He wondered how Bernard was able to build up the texture.

The company will keep providing art support services to artists and conservators in the same way it has for 51 years, “making sure things are done right.

“We’ll never rest on our laurels,” McKee said.

Ann Carrenza can be reached at healdsburg.towns@gmail.com.