Les Nabis

Les Nabis is an art movement dating from 1888. The gallery holds 80 works in this movement, including works by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard. Browse Les Nabis paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Les Nabis—from the Hebrew word for "prophets"—were a brotherhood of young French painters who coalesced in Paris around 1889 and remained active until roughly 1900. Most met as students at the Académie Julian, but the group's true point of origin lay in Brittany. In the summer of 1888, Paul Sérusier painted a small, near-abstract landscape of the Bois d'Amour at Pont-Aven under the direct guidance of Paul Gauguin, who urged him to render trees not as he saw them but as patches of pure, intensified colour. Brought back to Paris, the panel was revered by his friends as "The Talisman," the magical charm and founding icon of the movement. Through it the Nabis absorbed the lessons of Gauguin's Pont-Aven circle and its Synthetism, alongside Japanese woodcuts, Symbolist literature, and decorative tradition.

The group's guiding theory was supplied by the precocious Maurice Denis, who in August 1890, aged nineteen, published "Définition du néo-traditionnisme" in Art et Critique. Its opening sentence became a watchword of modern art: a picture, "before being a warhorse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order." In practice this meant flattened space, bold and often arbitrary colour, sinuous contour, and an emphasis on the decorative surface over naturalistic illusion.

The Nabis pursued divergent paths. Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard became the great "intimists," painting the muffled poetry of bourgeois interiors and gardens—seen in our holdings in Bonnard's The Terrace at Vernonnet and Village Scene, Grasse, and Vuillard's Garden at Vaucresson. Denis, Sérusier, and Paul Ranson leaned toward the mystical, religious, and theosophical, as in Denis's Bacchus and Ariadne and his luminous Drying the Linen, or Moonrise at the Priory. The Swiss-born Félix Vallotton brought a sharp graphic edge, especially in his woodcuts.

Deliberately erasing the hierarchy between fine and decorative art, the Nabis produced screens, posters, theatre designs, and prints as readily as easel paintings. Their flat, expressive colour fed directly into Fauvism and helped open the way to abstraction, while Gauguin's Ia Orana Maria, also in our collection, marks the Synthetist source from which their revolution sprang.