Maurice Denis

French painter

• Born: November 25, 1870
• Birthplace: Granville, France
• Died: November 13, 1943
• Place of death: Paris, France

Denis was a theorist of the Nabi school, a group of artists influenced by Paul Gauguin, as well as one of its more important artists. He restated and emphasized Gauguin’s belief that a painting should concern itself with being a painting, and not a reproduction or copy of nature. In the second part of Denis’s career, he helped bring about a revival of religious art.

Early Life

Maurice Denis (maw-rees deh-nee) was born in Granville, France, a village on the English Channel. His father was a railway official and his mother a milliner. Soon after his birth, his parents moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. In 1884, he discovered the Louvre and began taking drawing lessons. He began doing copies after the old masters and became interested in writing. He also began a journal that he was to keep all of his life. By 1885, Denis already believed that he wanted to devote his life to art and spent his summer vacation working in the studio of a Brazilian painter living in Paris. He attended the well-respected Lycée Condorcet, winning the first prize for Greek and philosophy.

The late nineteenth century was a time of great religious doubt in France, but Denis had declared himself a fervent Roman Catholic by the time he was sixteen. His taste in art was influenced by his religious beliefs, and he became interested in the work of Fra Angelico, a religious painter from the Italian Renaissance. The next year, Denis was greatly impressed by an exhibition of paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a painter famous for his simplified figures and decorative, friezelike compositions. In 1888, Denis entered the Académie Julian in Paris, where he became friends with Paul Sérusier, a painter who was seven years older than Denis and shared his interests in flat surfaces and simplifications of form. Both painters thought art should concentrate on spiritual reality rather than the reality seen in everyday life. That October, Sérusier returned from a visit with Paul Gauguin in Pont Aven, in Brittany, bearing “the good news of Gauguin’s ideas” and a landscape painting he had executed during his visit that embodied those ideas. Gauguin’s ideas about the necessary autonomy of art from nature and that landscape, The Talisman, with its flat areas of exaggerated colors applied almost straight from the paint tube, acted as a powerful catalyst, suddenly focusing Denis’s artistic direction.

Life’s Work

The Nabis, an art group whose members included Denis, Paul Ranson, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard, was formed around the ideas embodied in The Talisman. The term “Nabi” is derived from the Hebrew word for prophet, and Denis was the “Nabi of the beautiful icons” because of his interest in religious art. Denis believed that the Nabis’ colors and abstractions from nature could express all the thoughts and emotions of the human soul. Colors and color harmonies corresponded to specific emotions and thoughts, in Denis’s view, and a talented artist could evoke each of them in turn, always placing beauty above all else. Denis was the group’s chief intellectual and manifesto writer. The Nabis wanted to challenge the conservative established order of the academic art schools, and Denis gathered and integrated the various opinions within the Nabis and put them into writing.

Denis’s talent as an art theorist was spotted by his friend Aurélien Marie Lugné-Poë, a stage director for whom he later designed sets. Encouraged by Lugné-Poë, Denis wrote the Nabis’ manifesto, “Définition de Néo-Traditionnisme,” published in the periodical Art et critique in 1890. This highly influential proclamation contained the phrase for which Denis is most famous: “Remember that a picture before being a war horse, a nude, or some sort of anecdote is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” In this one sentence, Denis captured the essence of many important developments in art for the next seventy-five years, succinctly expressing Gauguin’s view that a painting must concern itself with being a painting rather than being a copy of nature. Denis had seen Gauguin’s work for the first time only the year before.

Denis’s own work reflects this interest in the abstract, decorative qualities of painting. April (1892) depicts six women along a flower-strewn path curving into the distance. The shapes of the women’s white dresses are simplified to the point at which they almost appear to be paper cutouts. The curves of the path, the foliage, and the crouching women resemble the decorative illustrations of Art Nouveau, while the strong colors capture the poetry that Denis believed to be the highest aspiration of painting. Other paintings from this period, such as The Battle of Jacob and the Angel (1893) and The Ascent to Calvary (1889), offer religious subject matter and areas of flat, strong color reminiscent of stained-glass windows.

By 1890, the Nabis were holding weekly meetings in Ranson’s studio, and Denis’s work was first exhibited in the Salon. His work was shown regularly after that at the Nabi exhibitions at the Barc de Bouteville Gallery, and at salons in Paris and Brussels. Denis’s decorative style lent itself to theater work, and he received his first commissions of decor and costumes in 1891. In 1893, he illustrated the program for Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with music by Claude Debussy. He also illustrated volumes of poetry and books, including Le Voyage d’Urien (1893; Urien’s Voyage , 1964) for André Gide, whom he first met in 1892. In 1893, Denis married Marthe Meurier, of whom he had painted several portraits.

Denis continued his writings, including the preface to the exhibition of Impressionists and Symbolists at the Barc de Bouteville Gallery in 1895, and regularly published articles about painting in leading French arts magazines. In the fall of 1895, he went on the first of his many trips abroad, bicycling through Italy with Sérusier. In 1898, he returned, visiting the composer Ernest Chausson in Florence and sightseeing in Rome with Gide, with whom he had lengthy discussions about classical art. After his return to Paris, Denis published an article based on these discussions in La Spectateur Catholique. In 1899, he received his first commission of religious art. He continued to receive commissions for secular and religious works for most of the rest of his life, executing paintings, stained glass, and decorations. Churches throughout France commissioned frescoes, and Denis became an important mural painter. He alternated between these large projects and smaller paintings of more intimate subjects. He also continued to work in graphic mediums, particularly lithography and woodcuts.

In 1900, Denis painted Hommage à Cézanne , one of his best-known works, which depicts the Nabis, with Odilon Redon, a Symbolist painter and illustrator, and Denis’s wife, standing in admiration around a Cézanne still life. It is an example of one of his larger works, nearly eight feet by six feet, and is painted in a much more conventional style than his other paintings, almost Rembrandtesque in the arrangement of the bodies and dark suits. Gide bought the painting the following year.

Denis was becoming more and more interested in religious art and in 1893 went to visit his friend the Dutch painter Jan Verkade at his monastery in Beuron. Denis had met and become friends with Verkade in 1891, and Verkade’s conversion to Catholicism had made a great impression on Denis. As he got older, Denis changed his position on the art of Gauguin, feeling that he had been called to serve his Roman Catholic faith by assisting the revival of religious art and that traditional religious art was better suited for this end. He became ultraconservative and began to apply rigid religious interpretations to his earlier ideas. Denis founded the Studio of Sacred Art in Paris in 1919 with Georges Desvallières. Their teaching was based on fourteenth century Italian art, rather than the ideas of Gauguin or the Nabis. In 1922, Denis published Nouvelles Théories sur l’art moderne, sur l’art sacré, 1914-1921 and in 1939, the lengthy Histoire de l’art religieux .

Denis also wrote extensively on nineteenth century artists, including Gauguin, Eugène Delacroix, and Édouard Manet and the Impressionists. Denis continued to travel widely until the late 1930’s, when his failing health and the decaying political situation made travel impossible. He remained prolific during this time, illustrating numerous books and with commissions for religious art virtually raining down on him. He continued working until his death, despite failing eyesight and occasional depressions caused by the deaths of his friends, many of whom were older than he. On November 13, 1943, Denis was killed by a car in Paris.

Significance

Denis’s genius lay in his abilities as a writer and theorist even more than his skills as a painter. He was by no means an ungifted artist, but most art historians agree that his work is not on the same level as that of Gauguin, Émile Bernard, or Sérusier, the leaders of the Pont Aven School, from which Denis derived much of his early style. In their works one can see the same reduction of the human form to a silhouette, a stylized outline lacking specific facial features, that Denis used in April. They did it first, however, and later artists and critics have been drawn by the Pont Aven style’s greater emotional expression, rather than the more decorative quality of Denis’s work.

Denis, however, was the person who most clearly articulated the aesthetic ideas of the Pont Aven group and of his own, the Nabis. It took a keen mind like that of Denis to give order and logic to the torrent of ideas gushing from this group of artists, though he had some help in doing so from Sérusier. Denis expressed these ideas so well that, generations later, artists practicing free abstraction, whose work was completely freed from the need to paint objects, would adopt Denis’s statement that a painting is “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” During his life, Denis was widely respected in the intellectual and artistic circles of France and Germany, a founding member of the Salon d’Automne, and sat on the exhibition juries of numerous salons. Some of his contemporaries believed that he would be one of the best-remembered figures of their time.

Bibliography

Boyer, Patricia Eckert, ed. The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. A detailed account of the Nabis, including an analysis of Denis’s book and theater illustrations that relates them to the group’s philosophy. Quotes from Denis’s writings are sprinkled throughout.

Chassé, Charles. The Nabis and Their Period. Translated by Michael Bullock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969. Contains a brief chapter on Denis plus a chapter on the forerunners of the Nabi movement and a chapter relating the Nabi style to sacred art, concentrating on the influence of the Abbey of Beuron in Germany.

Chipp, Herschel B., comp. Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Contains excerpts from several of Denis’s theoretical writings, and additional information on him in the introduction to the chapter “Symbolist Theories.”

Hudson, Suzanne. “Maurice Denis.” Artforum International 45, no. 1 (September, 2006): 176. A review of an exhibition of Denis’s work at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from October 31, 2006, until January 21, 2007.

Jaworska, Władysława. Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School. Translated by Patrick Evans. London: Thames & Hudson, 1972. Contains a brief chapter on Denis, focusing on his early period, his relationship with Gauguin’s ideas, and how he developed theories based on them. Also contains a chapter on Sérusier that speaks of his relationship with and influence on Denis.

Maurice Denis, Orangerie des Tuileries, 3 juin-31 août, 1970. Paris: Ministère d’État, Affaires Culturelles, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1970. An exhibition catalog that contains reproductions of numerous Denis paintings and prints, mostly in black and white. Also contains an extensive chronology of his life and work and a bibliography of his writings.