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Disaffected with the rigidly representational painting methods taught at
the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Denis joined with other like-minded
students in the fall of 1888 to form a brotherhood called the "Nabis," a
Hebrew word meaning "prophets." The group was spearheaded by Paul
Sérusier, who had visited
Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven over the summer and was now spreading an aesthetic message based on his interpretation of Gauguin's
Symbolism.
Sérusier sought to free form and color from their traditional
descriptive functions in order to express personal emotions and
spiritual truths. As evidence of Symbolism's liberating possibilities,
he offered a nearly abstract sketch produced under Gauguin's guidance.
The Nabis accorded such powers to this work—a loosely handled, brightly
colored representation of the Bois d'Amour at Pont-Aven painted on the
cover of a cigar box—that it became known as
The Talisman
(1888; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), suggesting mystical properties. In the
1890s, the group expanded to include Vuillard and several of his fellow
students at the École des Beaux-Arts, as well as Danish, Dutch,
Hungarian, and Swiss artists. The Nabis remained loosely affiliated, and
participated in solo and group exhibitions in France and around Europe,
until 1899.
The Nabis rejected the Renaissance ideal of easel painting as a window
onto a fictional world. Disavowing illusions of depth, they abandoned
both linear perspective and modeling. Like many of the
Impressionists and
Post-Impressionists, they were inspired by the broad planes of unmediated color, thick outlines, and bold patterns that characterize
Japanese prints.
Unlike prints, however, Nabi paintings often feature textured surfaces
created by varied brushstrokes. In the words of Maurice Denis, the
results remind us that painting "is essentially a flat surface covered
with colors assembled in a certain order."
In both their artistic production and their theoretical writings, the
Nabis stressed continuities between art and design. Although they
continued to use traditional supports like canvas and panel, they also
branched out to paint on a range of flat surfaces, including velvet,
cardboard, and screens. Like the members of the English
Arts and Crafts movement,
the Nabis maintained an egalitarian attitude toward materials and
collaborated with patrons, designers, publishers, and dealers on
decorative projects ranging from set designs to wallpaper, textiles,
ceramics, and stained glass. Several of the artists created posters,
illustrations, playbills, and other prints using the relatively new
method of
color lithography (
2000.35), which reproduced their characteristic flowing draftsmanship for mass audiences.
Many of these artists designed large-scale decorative schemes for specific interiors. Puvis de Chavannes (
58.15.2),
whose classicizing murals decorated some of the most important public
buildings of the day, provided an important precedent. Sérusier and
Denis were particularly influenced by Puvis' friezelike compositions set
against flattened landscapes painted in muted tones. Works like Denis'
Springtime (ca. 1894–99;
1999.180.2ab)
also adopt Puvis' distinctive approach to history painting, which
conveys abstract ideas, rather than actions or events, through idealized
groups of static figures. Vuillard's
Album series of 1895 (
2000.93.2)
adapts large-scale painting to the needs of a domestic interior.
Matching the eclecticism of patrons Thadée and Misia Natanson,
publishers of the avant-garde journal
La Revue Blanche, these
five paintings vary in size, motif, and color, and are linked only by
their common theme of women and flowers. Unlike Puvis' murals,
Vuillard's domestic series were not painted directly onto walls. Yet
they were sometimes displayed unframed, pinned directly against
patterned wallpaper, which emphasized continuity with their
surroundings.
Yet, as Nicholas Watkins notes in the exhibition catalogue
Beyond the Easel,
these artists' interest in interior décor did not render them "cultural
rebels." Rather, the Nabis and Puvis belong to a tradition of painters
decorating interiors that dates back at least to the frescoes and
tapestry cartoons that Raphael created for the Vatican. In the nineteenth century, artists as distinguished as
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix vied for commissions to decorate France's public buildings with large-scale murals depicting classical or religious narratives.
After the Nabis disbanded in 1899, Bonnard (
1975.1.156)
and Vuillard (2000.197) continued to develop an "Intimist" style of
decorative painting. Their small-scale works depict the artists' friends
and families in tight, domestic spaces packed with competing patterns.
Abandoning perspective (
1998.412.1) and emphasizing surface texture, the paintings merge figure and ground (
68.1) into a single plane so that discerning independent forms becomes a perceptual challenge.
The nineteenth-century decorative painters presage an important strain
of twentieth-century art that looks to interior spaces and to artists'
internal thoughts and experiences as refuges from the modern world. For
instance, the large
Waterlily paintings that
Monet produced in his final decades share the Nabis' desire to create all-encompassing environments that surround their viewers.
Henri Matisse
may be the true heir to this tradition, as he infused grand decoration
with colorist abstraction to create a new style that belonged fully to
his own historical moment.
Pa
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Houston, Texas and surrounding areas as the leader in Benjamin Moore
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