This page was made for you. It tells the story of the artist who painted this, the world it came from, and how to care for it for the decades ahead.
This is a Vanitas, one of the oldest and most serious genres in Western painting. The tradition was invented by Dutch and Flemish artists in the 17th century, and it rests on a single idea: everything passes. Painters arranged skulls alongside beautiful objects, flowers, food, musical instruments, clocks, books, to ask one question out loud: what does it mean to be alive knowing you will die?
Michel Bertrand takes that 400-year-old question and sets it inside a 1960s French domestic interior. Not a grand studio or a church. A bedroom. A teapot on a red-and-white patterned tablecloth. A vase of flowers. A floor lamp. The outline of a bed. The skull is still there, as it always is in a Vanitas. But the setting has changed. The message has become intimate rather than grand.
The brushwork is thick and textured. The palette is warm and subdued, softening the symbolism without removing it. This is a painting that asks you to slow down. Not to be afraid. Just to notice.
The Vanitas was invented in cold, Protestant, canal-city studios by Dutch and Flemish painters for whom death was a theological argument. Bertrand grew up in the sun-drenched south of France and spent his entire life there. His skull does not feel cold or forbidding. It feels almost comfortable, domestic, at home among the flowers and the teapot. That is what Mediterranean light does to northern symbols. It warms them without dissolving them.
Michel Bertrand was born on August 1st, 1935, in Montpellier, the sun-drenched capital of Languedoc in the south of France. He came from a modest family of small landowners who sold their crops at the local market. His early life was rooted in rural southern France, far from Parisian art-world elites.
He trained at the Ecoles des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and then Paris between 1954 and 1960. In Paris he absorbed the full range of post-war French art, but when his training was finished, he went back south. He spent the rest of his life working between Montpellier, Perpignan, and from 1989 in Rivesaltes, a small town near Perpignan on the edge of the Roussillon plain, close to the Spanish border. He died there in 2009.
That choice to remain in the south mattered. In Paris, his contemporaries were competing for gallery shows and critical attention. Bertrand was building a studio life rooted in Mediterranean light, landscape, and material: papier-mache, ink, bitumen, textures drawn from the physical world around him. He was associated with Claude Viallat and the Support/Surface movement, with Christian Boltanski, and with Benjamin Vautier, all significant names in the history of French contemporary art.
In 1981, the Musee National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris acquired six of his large-format works, four from the series Chantier interdit and two from the series Grand Journal. We show one representative work from each series below. They illustrate how dramatically his style evolved from this intimate 1965 Vanitas to the large-scale abstract works that defined his later career. An artist could not receive more authoritative recognition in France. He remained in the south anyway.
In 2015, Bernard Gouttenoire published a dedicated scholarly monograph on Bertrand's career: Michel Bertrand — Le geste, le dessin et l'ecriture. This painting is entry number 21. The monograph documents that the work remained in the artist's studio collection from the time it was painted until its recent sale. That is not a small detail. Artists keep the work they care about most.
This painting was found in Chalencon, a village in the Ardeche region of southern France. It sits at 700 meters altitude on a rocky cone above the deep gorge of the Eyrieux river, with views stretching to the Alps, the Vercors, and the volcanic peaks of the Massif Central. The Celts built a defensive settlement there between the 9th and 4th centuries BC. The Romans followed. By the Middle Ages it had become one of the twelve baronies of the Vivarais.
Its most famous baroness was Diane de Poitiers — the most powerful woman in France for twenty years, royal favorite of King Henri II, and one of the great figures of the French Renaissance. She was celebrated for her beauty, her intelligence, and her influence over the arts at the French court. She owned Chalencon.
The village was a Protestant stronghold during the Wars of Religion. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Protestantism became illegal and Chalencon's congregation gathered in secret in the countryside to worship, at risk of arrest by the King's dragoons. They built portable pulpits that they hid after each service. The original pulpit, known as the Chaire du desert, is still in the village church.
Still standing in the village: the Porte de Besse, an 11th century gate listed as a historic monument, and the Tour de la Potence, the Gibbet Tower, where executions were carried out. A painting whose central subject is a human skull came from a village that still has its execution tower. That is not a coincidence you could invent.
Chalencon, Ardeche, perched at 700 meters above the Eyrieux gorge, with the artist's city of Montpellier just 80 kilometers to the south.
The village of Chalencon, Ardeche. Image: myhauteloire.fr
Diane de Poitiers, Baroness of Chalencon and favorite of King Henri II of France.
The mid-1960s was a decade of contradictions. In Paris, young designers were shortening hemlines, Brigitte Bardot and Francoise Hardy were turning the line between fashion and celebrity into something entirely new, and Left Bank cafes were full of students treating cinema as seriously as painting. Across the Atlantic, American pop art was embracing bold, graphic imagery: fashion, posters, and album covers picking up the same playful palette. And underneath all of that color and joy ran a darker current: Vietnam, assassinations, a growing sense that the old certainties were cracking. Bertrand painted a skull in the middle of all of it.
You are now the custodian of something that has survived a remarkable amount of time, including six decades in the artist's own studio. These are the basics of keeping it that way.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what caught my eye when I first saw this painting, and offer a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.