Bernard Langlais was born in Old Town, Maine. As a young man, he studied commercial art in Washington, DC before enlisting in the Navy in 1942. After serving in the military he went to art school and attended the Corcoran School of Art, the Brooklyn Museum Art School and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Later in his career he attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Kunstakademie in Oslo.

Langlais spent most of his career in New York City. In 1956 he and his wife began summering in Cushing, Maine and in 1966 they moved there permanently.

The artist is known primarily for his abstract works including collage, construction and assemblage. His work of the 1960s was well received and he exhibited with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Nevelson.

Source: Northeast Auctions, August 2004

Bernard Langlais was born in Old Town, Maine, in 1921. He was the oldest of ten children of French Canadian parents. Although he had no formal artistic training in high school, he decided on a career as an artist from a young age.

After high school, he moved to Washington D.C. to study commercial art. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Navy, where he was classified as a painter, which lumped together house painters, illustrators, commercial artists, and fine artists. After six years of naval service, he attended to the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, and he received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, an event that changed his focus from commercial to fine art.

Skowhegan administrators gave him a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum School, where he studied with the famed German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann. He traveled to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grand Chaumiére in the early 1950s, and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study the works of Edvard Munch in Norway.

Langlais' experiments with wood began in 1956, when he returned from Norway and bought a summer cottage in Cushing, Maine. During renovations to the cottage, Langlais rebuilt an interior wall by piecing together scraps of wood. He found the work invigorating and inspiring, and continued to create abstract wall reliefs that he showed to great acclaim in New York throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s.

He was included in the important assemblage exhibition "New Forms -- New Media" at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, as well as having a solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961.

While he continued to develop his technique in what he called "painting in wood," figurative imagery began to dominate his work. By the time Langlais moved to Maine full-time in 1966, he was making room-sized wall reliefs, which soon grew into monumental statues that still populate the yard around his home in Cushing.

He died prematurely of congestive heart failure in 1977, but he has left a lasting legacy on the arts of his native state of Maine.