Roger Bertemes was born in Boevange in 1927. He studied at the École Normale de Luxembourg (1947), following his instinct to become a teacher. In pursuit of that goal, he undertook a traineeship at the Centre international d’études pédagogiques in Sèvres (France) in 1961. Shortly afterwards, he trained as an engraver in Johnny Friedlaender’s studio in Paris and immediately displayed an innate gift for this craft. Combining his talent for art and desire to teach, Bertemes created a guide entitled Art à l’école, which would become a seminal title for teaching art to children.
Artistically, Bertemes set himself no boundaries whatsoever. He experimented with painting, watercolours, etching, ink, silk-screen painting, sculpture, glass work and literary illustration. In this last field, the artist became a go-to figure, leading to him illustrating over 40 books for poets and writers from Luxembourg and the Luxembourg region of Belgium (Edmond Dune, Victor Fenigstein, Emile Hemmen, Gaspar Hons, Félix Molitor, Anise Koltz, Nic Klecker, Nic Weber and René Welter), Belgium (André Doms, Arthur Praillet and André Schmitz), France (Andrée Chedid, Philippe Delaveau, Jean-Pierre Geay, Denise Grappe, Eugène Guillevic, Guy Marester, Jean-Claude Renard, Joseph Paul Schneider and Michel Seuphor) Italy (Carlo Della Corte, Luigi Mormino and Franco Prete) and other European nations. Bertemes was so prolific and respected in this field that he earned the nickname ‘the poets’ painter’.
Regardless of the medium adopted, Bertemes’s art is marked by a poetic levity, a chromatic self-sufficiency that is both delicate and pregnant with substance, his native Luxembourg often an abstract subtext to his creations.
