Maurice Denis by Odilon Redon

Following on from French artist Paul S�rusier, I�m taking a look at fellow artist and member of Les Nabis, Maurice Denis (1870 � 1943).

Denis received a classical education in the Lyc�e Condorcet where he met Vuillard, Roussel and Lugn�-Po�. While studying in the Lyc�e he took drawing lessons and copied paintings by the old masters. In 1888 he enrolled at the Acad�mie Julian and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the same year painter Paul S�rusier showed his friends at the Acad�mie Julian the famous landscape, which he had painted at the suggestion of Gauguin at Pont-Aven and which, for this reason, was considered a "talisman" of Gauguin's doctrine of Synthetism.

S�rusier's The Talisman

This was a decisive revelation for Denis who found himself attracted by the new idea of Synthetism and by Gauguin's paintings, which he first saw at the exhibition of the Impressionist and Synthetist Group at the Caf� Volpini in 1889.

Denis joined the Nabis (a Hebrew word meaning 'prophets') and in 1890, in the review Art et Critique, he published his famous article in which he stated the artistic credo of the group. During this period he became associated with the Symbolist writers, illustrating the books of Andr� Gide and Paul Verlaine's Sagesse, and designing front-pieces for Maurice Maeterlinck's Pell�as et M�lisande and for musical scores of Claude Debussy.

Like the other Nabis, Denis experimented in various fields of art, designing carpets, painting cartoons for stained-glass and mosaic panels, and decorating ceramics. The 1890s saw his first large-scale decorative works, the painted ceiling in the house of the French composer Chausson (1894) and a cycle of panels on the theme The Legend of St. Hubert (1897) in the house of the collector Cochin.

His early work as a painter is marked by originality, though he was strongly influenced by the art of the Italian Renaissance, especially after his trips to Tuscany and Umbria in 1895 and 1897. Though his paintings and mural decorations of subsequent years can now seem rather anaemic and sugary, his fame continued to grow. He received numerous commissions: from 1899 to 1903 he decorated the Church of Sainte-Croix at V�sinet; and in 1908-9 he was commissioned by Ivan Morozov, Russian industrialist and famous patron of art, to make a series of decorative panels, The Story of Psyche, which he brought to Moscow in January 1909 to install in Morozov's house.

In 1913, Denis did ceiling paintings for the Th��tre des Champs-Elys�es; in 1917, he worked in the Church of St. Paul at Geneva; in 1924, he decorated the dome of the Petit Palais in Paris; and in 1928, he painted the ceiling above the staircase in the Senate building. Between 1936 and 1939, he did a number of decorative panels for the Palais des Nations in Geneva. In addition to his work as a painter, Denis was one of the most prominent art theoreticians of the time. His articles on contemporary art, published in various magazines, were later collected in Th�ories (1912) and Nouvelles theories (1922). Maurice Denis died in 1943.

Part 2 will look at more of Marice Denis�s paintings, and Part 3 at his delicate lithographs.

1890 Bretons oil on canvas

1891  Easter Morning or Easter Mystery oil on canvas

1891 Eva Meurier in a Green Dress oil on canvas

1891 Princess Maleine's Minuet or Marthe Playing the Piano oil on canvas

1891 The Seasons Series, September or September Evening oil on canvas

1892 Regatta at Perros oil on canvas

1892 Rocks at Pouldu oil on board

1892 The Sleeper or Young Girl Asleep oil on canvas

1892 Wedding Procession oil on canvas � 2003 State Hermitage Museum

c1892 Encounter oil on  cardboard Copyright � 2003 State Hermitage Museum

1893 The Muses in the Sacred Wood

1894 Mary Visits Elizabeth

1894 Virginal Spring (Flowering Apple Trees) oil on canvas

1895 Mother and Child oil on canvas � 2003 State Hermitage Museum

c1895 Furrows in the Snow

1896 Martha and Mary oil on canvas � 2003 State Hermitage Museum

1897 Figures in a Spring Landscape (Sacred Grove) oil on canvas � 2003 State Hermitage Museum

1897 Noele's First Steps oil on panel

1897 Portrait of Yvonne Lerolle

1899 Parisians at the Seaside, Evening oil on canvas

1899 Woman in Blue oil on paper

1899 Young Girl Wearing an Apron

This is part two of a two-part post on the works of French painter, and member of Les Nabis group, Paul S�rusier (1864-1927). For biographical notes and more works see part one.

1893 Peasant with Three Cows

1893 Portrait of Emile Bernard at Florence tempera on canvas

1894 Celtic Tale oil on canvas

1894 The Wash in a Large Meadow oil on canvas

c1900-1915 Synchromy in Yellow oil on canvas � 2011 Norton Simon Art Foundation

1903 The Stagecoach Road in the Country with a Cart oil on canvas

1904 Landscape oil on canvas

1905 The Aqueduct oil on canvas

1905 Undergrowth at Huelgoat oil on canvas

1906 The Blue Valley oil on canvas

c1906 Evening oil on canvas

1910 Mignonne Allons si la Rose  oil on canvas

1910 The Flock in the Black Forest

c1910 The Fern Harvesters in the Boid d'Amour at Pont Aven oil on canvas

c1911-14 Bathers oil on canvas

1912 Paysage

c1912 Scene oil on canvas

1917 Shepherd in the Valley of Chateauneuf oil on canvas

1919 A Widow oil on canvas

1919 Les Heures oil on canvas

I�m going to do a mini-series on Les Nabis. Les Nabis (pronounced nah bee) were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian (Acad�mie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s.

Paul S�rusier (1864 � 1927) was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabi movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism. S�rusier was born in Paris into a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was a successful businessman in the perfume industry. 

In 1885, after a short period of work in the company of his father's friend, Paul entered the Acad�mie Julian to study art. His lifelong friendship with Maurice Denis started there. In 1888, S�rusier arrived at Pont-Aven in Brittany, a town popular among French and foreign artists. There S�rusier's attention was attracted by a group of artists who crowded around Emile Bernand and Paul Gauguin. Gauguin encouraged the young painter to release himself from the constraints of imitative painting, to use pure colours, not to hesitate to exaggerate his impressions, and to give to the painting his own decorative logic and symbolic system. 

S�rusier returned to Paris with a small painting, drawn under Gauguin's guidance, and showed it enthusiastically to his friends, sharing the new ideas that he learned from Gauguin. They called the painting The Talisman. 

1888 The Talisman, the Aven River at the Bois d�Amour oil on canvas � photo muse�e d'Orsay / rmn

S�rusier began active propaganda, which according to Maurice Denis caused passionate debates among the students. Together with the friends who shared the new ideas, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Ibels and Paul Ranson, S�rusier formed a group which they called Nabis (Hebrew "prophets"). They met regularly to discuss theoretical problems of art, symbolism, occult sciences and esotericism. Later, Armand Seguin, Edouard Vuillard and Kerr-Xavier Roussel joined the group. However, after Gauguin's departure to Tahiti, in 1891, the group gradually fell apart and its members developed separately in different directions.

In the summer of 1892 S�rusier returned to Brittany, to the small village Huelgoat. Huelgoat became the place of his work for the next two years. His subjects were Breton peasants, their figures monumental and solid. The painter's palette too had changed, he no longer used pure colours, but toned them down with grey.

S�rusier spent his winters in Paris, working with his friend Lugn�-Poe, founder of Th��tre de l'Oeuvre. Many of the Nabis artists participated in the scene decoration and costume design of the Symbolist plays of the theater, S�rusier among them. The theatre made it possible for them to try out on a large scale their principles of simplification and the synthesis of the various means of expression.
In 1895, S�rusier accepted an invitation of his friend Jan Verkade, to go to the Benedictine monastery of Beuron in Germany. The monk-artists of the monastery practiced the aesthetic principles, according to which the laws of beauty were divine ones; they were mysteriously hidden in nature and could be revealed only to the artists who were able to perceive the proportions and the harmony of the sizes. The new doctrines appealed to S�rusier, and on his return to Paris he tried to convince his Nabi friends in their novelty and importance. The ideas met no enthusiasm in Paris and S�rusier distanced himself from his former friends.  After several successive voyages to Beuron, he settled in Brittany and cultivated painting primarily based on calculations and measurements. He applied Beuron ideas to his Breton subjects. Then he studied Egyptian art, the Italian primitivists, and the tapestries of the Middle Ages.

From 1908, he started to teach regularly at the Ranson Academy. In 1921 S�rusier published "ABC of Painting", a short treatise in which he developed a theory of the curves and simple shapes, and a theory of colour and a method of research of the deafened colours. The book represented the summary of S�rusier's aesthetic research. He died in 1927 in Morlaix. This is a two-part post on the works of Paul S�rusier, part two will show more works.

[date unknown] Avenue de Neuilly oil on board

1889 Bretonne donnant a` manger aux cochons tempera on canvas � photo muse�e d'Orsay / rmn

1889 La barrie`re fleurie, Le Pouldu oil on canvas � photo muse�e d'Orsay / rmn

c1889-90 The Sea at Poldu, Sunset oil on canvas

1890 A Bretonne Sunday oil on canvas

1890 Farmhouse at Le Pouldu oil on canvas

1890 Fisherman on the Laita oil on board

1890 Mother and Child on a Breton Landscape oil on canvas

1890 Two Breton Women under a Flowering Apple Tree oil on canvas

1890 Yellow Farm at Pouldu

1891 Square with Street Lamp oil on canvas

1891 Woman in a Street oil on canvas

c1891-93 Breton Women, the Meeting in the Sacred Grove oil on canvas

c1891  Eve Bretonne ou M�lancolie oil on canvas

c1891 Plate of Apples oil on canvas

1892 La Couseuse oil on canvas

1892 Les Laveuses a` la Lai�ta oil on canvas

1892 Madeline with the Offering oil on canvas

1892 The Ile de la Douane, the Mouthe of the Trieux River watercolour

1893 Bretons in the Forest of Huelgoat oil on canvas