Filiger, Charles - Breton Countryside (1890)

The Hermit of Brittany and the Geometry of God

Charles Filiger was the kind of man who would go to a party just to stand in the corner and stare at the wallpaper. While Gauguin was out trying to be the king of the primitives, Filiger was in Le Pouldu shrinking the universe. He didn't paint the Breton countryside because he liked the fresh air. He painted it because he was a mystic who saw the world as a series of holy puzzles.

Breton Countryside is a radical piece of work for 1890. Barely larger than a postcard, but inside that small frame, Filiger was busy inventing the future. He broke the hills into geometric patterns long before the Cubists realized they could do the same. He ignored the rules of distance and light. He replaced the messy reality of the grass and soil with flat colors and heavy outlines.

He lived as a hermit at the Inn of Marie Henry. His peers thought his tiny works were bizarre. They didn't understand why a man would spend his life obsessed with Byzantine icons in a tiny village in Brittany. But Gauguin saw it. He called Filiger a genius.

Filiger wasn't interested in the grand gestures of the nineteenth century. He was interested in the quiet. This work is a Synthetist manifesto in watercolor and gouache. It‘s a rejection of the window on the world style of painting, a map of a mind that preferred silence over the noise of the modern world. He died in 1928, forgotten and alone, but he left behind a vision of nature that was far more honest than anything the Romantics ever dreamed up.

References

Boyle-Turner, Caroline. The Gauguin School The Pont-Aven Group. London, Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Jaworska, Władysława. Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School. Greenwich, New York Graphic Society, 1972.

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