Maurice Denis

Maurice Denis (1870-1943), known as the "Nabi of the beautiful icons," was one of the most important French painters of the Symbolist generation, celebrated alongside Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard as a founder of the Nabi movement, its brilliant theoretician, and unquestionably its most fervent promoter. Deeply religious throughout his life, Denis wrote numerous reviews, articles, and treatises, including the group's manifesto defending the innovations of Paul Gauguin that emphasized the importance of the decorative elements of line, color, and form over pure representation. A member of the Symbolist movement, Denis developed theories that would contribute to the foundations of Cubism, Fauvism, and abstract art in the decades to come.

Denis received a classical education at the Lycée Condorcet, where he met Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Aurélien Lugné-Poë. While studying there he took drawing lessons and copied paintings by the Old Masters. In 1888 he enrolled at the Académie Julian and then at the École des Beaux-Arts. In that same year, Paul Sérusier showed his friends at the Académie Julian the famous landscape he had painted at the suggestion of Gauguin in Pont-Aven, a work later considered a "talisman" of Gauguin's doctrine of Synthetism. This was a decisive revelation for Denis, who found himself immediately 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 stating the artistic credo of the group. During this period he became closely associated with the Symbolist writers, illustrating the books of André Gide and Paul Verlaine's Sagesse, and designing frontispieces for Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and for musical scores of Claude Debussy.

Like the other Nabis, Denis experimented across many 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, including the painted ceiling for the house of the French composer Ernest Chausson in 1894. Denis continued to produce ambitious mural cycles, religious commissions, and easel paintings throughout the following decades, and his writings on modern painting, especially his celebrated dictum that "a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order," profoundly shaped the intellectual foundations of twentieth-century modernism. His paintings and decorative works are held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée Maurice Denis in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and other major museums worldwide.