ART & ARTISTS: 2011-11-06

Saturday, 12 November 2011

Maurice Denis - part 1

Maurice Denis 1903 by Odilon Redon

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

Denis received a classical education in the Lycée Condorcet where he met Vuillard, Roussel and Lugné-Poë. While studying in the Lycée he took drawing lessons and copied paintings by the old masters. In 1888 he enrolled at the Académie Julian and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the same year painter Paul Sérusier showed his friends at the Académie 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.


Sérusier'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 Café 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 André Gide and Paul Verlaine's Sagesse, and designing front-pieces for Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande 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 Vésinet; 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 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; 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 Théories (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
© 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

Thursday, 10 November 2011

Paul Sérusier - part 2

This is part two of a two-part post on the works of French painter, and member of Les Nabis group, Paul Sérusier (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 Synchrony 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

1903 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

Tuesday, 8 November 2011

Paul Sérusier - part 1

Paul Sérusier (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. Sérusier 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 Académie Julian to study art. His lifelong friendship with Maurice Denis started there. In 1888, Sérusier arrived at Pont-Aven in Brittany, a town popular among French and foreign artists. There Sérusier'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.

Sérusier 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.

Sérusier 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, Sérusier 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 Sérusier 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.

Sérusier spent his winters in Paris, working with his friend Lugné-Poe, founder of Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Many of the Nabis artists participated in the scene decoration and costume design of the Symbolist plays of the theater, Sérusier 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, Sérusier 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 Sérusier, 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 Sérusier 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 Sérusier 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 Sérusier's aesthetic research. He died in 1927 in Morlaix. This is a two-part post on the works of Paul Sérusier, part two will show more works.