Le mandarin
(The Mandarin)

1979, acrylic on canvas, 116 x 89 cm
Coll. Gaston Bertrand Foundation
N° inv. 1436

Among all the sketches and researches on male figures, the ones which inspired the largest number and the most fruitful variations were undoubtedly those undertook by Bertrand for the Portrait de Maître Marcel La Haye (Portrait of Marcel La Haye). Over the years, the artist repeatedly came back to one or another sketch in order to create some sort of iconic figures in which the model almost completely vanished under the pressure of increasingly autonomous calligraphic lines. Only some disparate elements from the model remained: a round-shaped lip, the morphology of an eye, the diamond shape formed by the thumbs and forefingers, the folds of a loose sleeve. After he had painted three different portraits of the lawyer, Bertrand produced the versions entitled L’homme à la toge (Man with a robe) (1969), Figure aux ombres transparentes (Figure with transperent shadows) (1971)… and finally Le Mandarin (The Mandarin) in 1979. 
This painting, which is part of the masterful series of figures painted by Bertrand, is the perfect illustration of the technique boldly used by the artist and which consisted in cutting out the mask of the figure, in eclipsing some parts of the face – usually the eye socket – or even parts of the skull bone, in playing with gaps and reshaping the figure according to the artist’s expressive aims.