Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information
Fine Art PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Whitford Fine Art Celebrating its 40th Anniversary Year

Featuring Georges Bernède’s Dynamic Abstractions on February 15 – 19
at the Palm Beach Jewelry, Art & Antiques Show Palm Beach County Convention Center

Georges Bernède paintings investigate the boundaries of abstraction like a great musical rhythm and are easily accessible to today’s art buyers according to London paintings dealers WHITFORD FINE ART

At the 2013 Palm Beach Jewelry, Art & Antiques Show February 15 – 19 London paintings dealers An Jo Fermon and Adrian Mibus of WHITFORD FINE ART (www.whitfordfineart.com) are showing a collection of abstract paintings by the French painter, Georges Bernède (French, born 1926), the first exhibition of his works there.

An Jo Fermon is a Belgian author and art dealer. When she first journeyed to the artist’s studio in a small village many miles outside Bordeaux, France she was captivated by a cache of abstract expressionist works she says, “Were fantastic gestural paintings, akin to the work of Motherwell or Soulages! Bernède told me how he had never really exhibited outside Bordeaux and how his life’s work was there in his studio attic. I was mesmerized.”
In 2011 WHITFORD FINE ART held the first one-man show for Georges Bernède at its Duke Street St James’s gallery in London, which proved a sell-out success. This fall a second show was again a great success. Now they have brought Bernède’s works to Palm Beach for the first time and are confident Americans will find his paintings as captivating as they do.

Fermon says, “When I interviewed Bernède and analyzed his oeuvre spanning 1940 to today I was stunned to see that Bernède had not been influenced by other artists but had come to this style via his very own developments. With Henri Matisse as a starting point in 1942, Bernède initially used colour to build up his paintings in an Expressionist manner. But during the late 1950s and early 1960s these paintings became abstract. By the 1980s Bernede says he felt exhausted by colour and comfortable enough to express himself in black and white. It was his attempt to purify his expression, a path he had chosen early on.”

Born in 1926 Bernède’s career a painter began under the influence of the established Bordeaux painter Mildred Bendall (1891-1977). Drawing on Bendall’s training with Henri Matisse, Bernède first adhered to figurative expression rooted in the Cubism of Andre Lhote, while using strong colour as building blocks. His disapproval of black tracing for shadows paved the way for his researches into Abstraction during the 1950s, when he witnessed the breakup of the Bordeaux avant-garde.

“Bernède truly investigated the boundaries of Abstraction,” Fermon says. “His goal was to express the essence of life and to establish an analogy to musical rhythm. This grew into gestural paintings, first with colour, then partnered with a black and white palette. These works have a dynamic, spontaneous and dramatic impact through the energetic application of the paint, while remaining deceptively subtle.”

“Our clients find Bernède’s paintings easily accessible for they evoke the collective sense of an archetypal visual language, and aid understanding of the world through heightened self-consciousness and awareness, a concept adopted by the Action painters from Freud and Jung.” Prices range from $8,500. to $15,000.

“To me,” Fermon adds, “Georges Bernède was never an imitator, for with Matisse and Lhote as a starting point, his style evolved instinctively through disciplined research and progress, as his artistic development over the years testifies.”

ABOUT WHITFORD FINE ART…….
A member of the Society of London Art Dealers, WHITFORD FINE ART maintains an enormous inventory of 2500 works by more than a hundred artists ranging from Arman and Clive Barker, the subject of An Jo Fermon’s first major book, to Pol Bury, Calder, Cocteau, Valmier, Van Dongen, Leger, Gleizes, Andre Lhote, Dominguez and many others.
Gallery Director Adrian Mibus says, “WHITFORD FINE ART has dealt in investment stock for forty years. This means our clients benefit from our commitment to build a relationship, not just make a sale. Our American clients know that with a committed dealer they can start their paintings and sculpture collections now and continue to get guidance and advice as their tastes and lifestyles change. No auction house can refine and upgrade an art collection, not with its constantly changing staff.”

WHITFORD FINE ART takes seriously its obligation to provide its clients with first-rate scholarship and guidance in making their choices, which is shown in their enviable publication record.

Fermon points out that clients feel comfortable returning time and again to the gallery. She tells the story of an Albert Gleizes gouache on paper dating to 1913, “Tête d’Homme,” that has three times returned and been resold – “a happy consequence of our friendships with clients.”

WHITFORD FINE ART has been a featured dealer at major world art fairs including MASTERPIECE LONDON and fairs in New York and Palm Beach.

Palm Beach County Convention Center

650 Okeechobee Blvd West Palm Beach, FL

Opposite City Place www.palmbeachshow.com

Feb 15 by invitation Feb 16-18 from 11-7 Feb 19 from 11-6

and at

WHITFORD FINE ART

6 Duke Street, St James’s

London SW1Y 6BN

011 44 207 930 9332

www.whitfordfineart.com

[email protected]