What is Bertism

Berthe Hess was a full-time professional painter in oil on canvas. She invented a totally new technique called Bertisme, hailed in the art world as the only serious new technique to emerge since Picassoism. The term "Berthisme"was first attributed to I.J Berthe Hess's work in 1969 by British art critic Peter Fuller (Modern Painters, Synthesis…)

Bertisme involves the 'sculpting' of a picture by tiny brush strokes on canvas out of enormous quantities of oil paint. No palette knife is used and a single painting took Berthe up to 2 years to complete. Finished surfaces are up to 2 1/2 inches thick and required several years to dry.

The surface of her finished work is rather like looking at a relief map of the Himalayas with many peaks and chasms, caves and crags, hills and hollows. It is built from many thousands of interwoven globules of paint, each globule containing uncountable hair like veins of colour like those seen in the glass marbles we played with as children.

Berthe Hess had a sense of scale and composition approaching the grandeur of the old masters. The technique used is as painstaking and difficult to master as that of any school that has ever existed.