Reviews

In The City Press (1969), Peter Fuller, a greatly respected art critic and the first editor of the magazine Modern Painters, wrote:
“Berthe Hess has already been heralded by discriminating critics for her work”.
He concludes by saying:
“Each canvas is a triumph, a superb and highly original work. Taken together, they are more than that: they are a real contribution to the art of this century.”
In The Investors Review (1973), Eleanora Best describes Hess’ work as “An art that is above fashion
and fortune”
…”Magically different”.
The article concludes by comparing her importance to that of Picasso, saying: “The King is dead -long live the Queen”.

The Times (1969) says of this effect:
“… can be appreciated from both an abstract and subject standpoint”…
“The artist so welds her colour with form, that a picture emerges, as one looks, from the seemingly abstract surface, often with fascinating effect.”
In The Arts Review in July 1968 and again in April 1969, Richard Walker says:
“In close-up these paintings are bewildering shredded surfaces of interpenetrating colour”…
“One draws back a few feet and the picture changes, becomes in fact a picture… undistorted, but remote, in its own atmosphere.”
The Sunday Times (1972), Phillip Oakes with Lesley Garner, under the headline Top Berthe in the City, says of her technique
“The surface can be over two inches thick, reflecting colour and light, part painting, part sculpture.”
Synthesis, published in the UK, France, Canada and the USA said:
“Her technique is so demanding, painstaking and apparently impossible as to be almost obsessional.The final image is not superficial illusion, as in normal painting, but consists of the merging ofnumerous points of colour and light; situated at different levels.”

Buying Antiques said:
“Her use of colour is incredible”. The way in which the colour is used allows her to use every shade and tone of every conceivable colour; no matter what the subject. Thus she gains all of the advantages foreseen by the painter Seurat (as the result of his study of the science of colour); but without his rigid, mechanistic, carefully planned assault on the canvas. She is able to apply the theory behind Seurat’s paintings without ever knowing what it is, in a totally spontaneous, unconscious and free application of paint’.
INVESTORS REVIEW 29th JUNE 1973 by ELEANOR BEST THE WORLD OF BERTHE HESS
SOME artists – even the very great ones – thrive on ambiguity and deliberate obscurity. Picasso admitted to tweaking the nose of his credulous public upon occasion; in an interview in 1952, he spoke with uncharacteristic candour of “all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games,with all these absurdities, with all these puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous – and that very quickly . . . and today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich.” At least Picasso was a joker of genius; an artless public seeking to become artful are not always so lucky. In an era when many artists have opted to become celebrities and pop stars, the few who remain constant for something above and beyond mere faddishness or cleverness tread a lonely path. Berthe Hess is one of these determined idealists.

Despite, the romantic aura which cloaks the painter, his life is hardly less prosaic than our own. Like us, he has to pay for the rent, heat and light-and often his prolific output is dictated by the hard financial demands of a gallery. The painter who discovers the key to the public fancy, who hits upon a winning formula and patents it, has won a Pyrrhic victory. Too often, the immediacy which must characterise really great art subsides into a tired repetition of sure-fire themes; the aim becomes increasingly steady but the impact correspondingly weak.

Berthe Hess has succumbed to none of these hazards of success. A painter who is already enshrined in her own museums – one in Landon and one in Paris – her rigorous devotion to her cause, “Berthisme”, insures that her inspiration does not become stultified – or overwrought with clandestine “meanings”. In return, her vigorous sincerity has found remuneration in both academic and investment circles. From £400 for a small jewel of a painting – a vase of flowers, a shadowy dancer, a pale sailboat in a thick dusk of interming1ing brushstrokes – to the £30,000 asked for one of her large canvasses La Chasse, perhaps the red-frocked hunting party gamboling through a dappled autumn landscape – the figures merely attempt to put into perspective an art which is above fashion and fortune. But the man who pays the price is hardly fortune’s foo1 – six years ago her largest scenes were bringing only £750.

An attempt to describe a style of painting in the medium of words is a perilous task, and “Bertisme”resists categorising with more, than usual persistence. But the writer must take his challenges in the same spirit as the painter, and so he tries. A simple explanation of “Bertisme” could begin by calling it Impressionism taken one step further. Based on a loose marriage of theories garnered from Pissaro and Manet, it utilises thick threads of paint, clustered one on top of another, like pile in a carpet. Ten different hues can be found in one inch-thick stroke; like the true Impressionists of old, she captures not so much the line and substance of an object, but the entire glimmering texture of light hanging in the air in between the painting and the astonished eye. . Sometimes three inches deep, a work in “Bertisme” requires hundreds of pounds worth of paint, a, year to finish and two years to dry. A painting’s crags and peaks, Chasms and variegated veins of interwoven colour are truly sculptural in quality, but they claim an added dimension of time and movement through the ever-changing tricks of sight – forms and colours which leap out of the picture and then retreat into shade once the gaze has shifted.

The gradual evolution of her style over a 20-year period, and the infinite patience which is necessary to complete each 20-pound mass of impasto, ensures that there can be no such thing as a forgery of a Berthe Hess painting, The manner in which each globule of paint incorporates innumerable but separate hair-threads of pigment is itself an art which has taken years to perfect. It is Britain’s gain that Mrs Hess has chosen to perfect it here. A French-woman, who with her husband and daughter has adopted, this nation as her own, she finds that Britain itself provides matchless a model and an open-ended studio, Barges on the Thames, Saint Paul’s, the hunt, ,the roaring grey sea are all subjects which Britons know and love and which her brush translates into scenes that are at once familiar and magically different. Unlike Picasso, she does not caper, pull our leg, tweak our ears and then ask us to worship artifice as well as art. Her sincerity and crystalline directness are above such devices; there are no ” periods” or “isms” other than her own “Berthisme”. Picasso was king – and Jester – and I know the king is dead. Long live the queen! Buying Antiques Berthe Hess has a sense of scale and composition approaching the grandeur of the old masters.. – Her work can never be copied, imitated, or forged –
Investors Review 1974
Her work can never be copied, imitated, or forged
Tony Cornwall-Jones
Her permanent exhibition had a procession of famous visitors, which included Prince Charles, Princess Anne, and the French President, Giscard D’Estaing

AN OBSESSION WITH PAINT
“I.J. Berthe Hess is an extraordinary painter; her work is war, strangely sensuous, atmospherically impressive and sensitive and yet her technique is so demanding, painstaking and apparently impossible as to be almost obsessional. The paint is built up sculpturally to a depth of two inches. Each brushstroke is short, sharp and infinitesimally small. The surface of the canvas becomes a myriad of grottos, which capture and contain the light reflecting it off at a thousand different angles.

The final image is not a superficial illusion, as in a normal painting, but consists in the merging of numerous points of colour and light, situated at different levels. It can not be said to exist on any fixed plane, but floats somewhere between the viewer and the canvas. Yet, the remarkable thing about this work is that Berthe Hess sacrifices nothing of detail or suggestion. In her later work, she has disciplined herself further by banishing obvious colour contrasts, as they yield effects too easily, and deny her the intense struggle with her materials which is an essential part of her process of creation.

There are no obsessive images in her work; she treats all subjects with the same overwhelming sense of warmth and humanity: dancers, night-club singers, peasants, flowers, athletes, boxers,animals and landscapes, the insistence lies solely in the way which she approaches her themes.

By this sheer dedication, this incessant persistent application to a process which seems to be all but impossible, she achieves an intensity which is similar to that of the Surrealists. Her painterly neurosis, which compels her to work for weeks on a few inches of canvas at a time, gives her work the kind of compelling, vibrating, mysterious magical quality which one would not associate with such urbane, subject matter.

Peter Fuller, Synthesis – A New Magazine of the Arts, 1969
The paintings are monuments to patience: after the arduous, demanding business of actually creating them, they then take several years to dry. But the exotic power which the technique releases makes all the effort worthwhile.”