Pierre Bernard: “Make The Message Your Own”
Esteemed French graphic designer Pierre Bernard died on November 23, 2015. In a career that spanned over 40 years, Bernard designed posters and identity systems for some of France’s most well-known cultural institutions. His insistence on integrating political opinions into the design process set an example for the design profession.
Bernard’s career was shaped by the widespread social unrest in France in the 1960s, especially the student uprisings of May, 1968. While attending the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts-Decoratifs, Bernard collaborated in the student art workshop that designed and printed protest posters. The silk-screened posters were potent distillations of left-wing, youthful anger at French president Charles de Gaulle, capitalism, and bourgeois complacency.
While he was a student Bernard met and worked with François Miehe and Gérard Paris-Clavel. In 1970 the three formed Grapus, a design group that continued the principles of the student uprisings. They worked as a collective, never signed work with anything but “Grapus,” and avoided mainstream, commercial clients in order to maintain the integrity of their political beliefs. In 2006, in his Erasmus Prize acceptance speech, Bernard stated that “to move the viewer, an image has to go through the filter of one’s personal experience and inner convictions, and you must make the message your own.”
Poster designed by Grapus for an exhibition of Grapus posters, 1982
When Grapus dissolved in 1991, Bernard formed the Atelier de Création Graphique with Dirk Behage and Fokke Draaijer. One of their first notable commissions was the design of a visual identity for the Louvre museum.
Pierre Bernard was 73.
There will be a celebration of the life and work of Pierre Bernard on Thursday, February 25, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. The memorial will include talks by Keith Godard and Scott Santoro, as well as tributes sent by Paula Scher, James Victore, Roger Remington, and Erik Speikermann. Videos of Bernard and images of his work will be shown. The celebration is organized by Leslie Blum, Assistant Professor in the Communication Design Department at FIT.
Fashion Institute of Technology
Dubinsky Building
West 27th Street, near 8th Avenue
8th Floor
6:00 to 8:00 pm
Free and open to the public.
For more information, email Leslie Blum at leslie_blum@fitnyc.edu.
