Printmaker and graphic designer Bernard P. Schardt was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 20, 1904. He briefly attended the University of Wisconsin before transferring to the School of the Art Intitute of Chicago in 1924. By 1928 he had moved to Greenwich Village in New York, working as a graphic artist and attending the Art Students League where he studied under Boardman Robinson and Max Weber. In the early 1930s he co-owned a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with Jackson Pollock and two other artists; later, Schardt, his wife Nene, and Pollock would share an apartment in New York for a brief time. 

With the onset of the Depression and the subsequent formation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Schardt was employed by the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935, overseeing the Allocations Division, and he exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937 and 1938. In 1939 he supervised demonstration exhibitions at the New York World's Fair, and that same year he was put in charge of the FAP's Poster Division. Around this time he met and married fellow artist Nene Vibber. At this time he also worked with Anthony Velonis at the Creative Printmakers Group in New York. Schardt's drawings and prints from this time frequently addressed the daily lives of the working class. 

Schardt exhibited at the Federal Gallery and the Municiple Art Gallery in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (1940), and elsewhere.

In the 1960s the Schardts relocated to Truro, Massachusetts, just north of Provincetown. Schardt continued to work on his own art and also to mentor young artists in art classes at the Brooklyn Museum. Schardt died in Truro on June 1, 1979.

His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Krannert Art Mseum, University of Illinois; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the New York Public Library; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, KY; and the University of Kentucky Art Museum.