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COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for the Advancement of Education
"AT THE BEGINNING of the nineties, a war cry rang from one studio to another: `Away with easel pictures! away with that unnecessary piece of furniture!' Painting was to come into the service of all the arts, and not be an end in itself. `The work of the painter begins where that of the architect is finished. Hence let us have walls, that we may paint them over.... There are no paintings, but only decorations.'"
This statement, made by Dutch painter Jan Verkade, rousingly summed up the idealistic aims of a group of young French artists in the 1890s, who banded together under the banner of the "Nabis" ("prophets"). As seen in the Nabis' baffle cry, they rejected painting as an illusionistic window onto nature--a concept primarily associated with easel painting--in favor of an art of decoration. The result was a new kind of painting wherein the message was conveyed through formal means. It was also a way of expanding the boundaries of painting from the framed object to be exhibited and sold to an artwork intimately linked to the interior for which it was intended.
Professional colleagues and lifelong friends, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel were members of the Nabis for a decade. They were not effetes or bohemians, but progeny of middle- to upper-class parents. Roussel was the son of a wealthy homeopathic doctor; Vuillard was the coddled youngest child in a household run by his widowed and financially independent mother; and Bonnard was the son of a senior administrator in the War Ministry. Only Denis, the son of a railroad administrator,...
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