The fin-de-siècle Marian Fetish: Women and French society within the work of Maurice Denis

Abstract

The Nabis were a prominent group of avant-garde artists from the Académie Julien who pushed the boundaries of representational art in fin de siècle Paris. Among this group of men who valued esoteric spirituality and the developing symbolist painting and literature was the orthodox Catholic Maurice Denis. In his paper, McKee utilizes often overlooked works in Denis’s oeuvre and reinterprets those most cited to analyze the peculiar role of women within the work of this paradoxically (or is it?) orthodox Catholic and avant-garde artist. Utilizing the Positivist psychology of Charcot McKee demonstrates the problematic nature of female religious ecstasy within an increasingly secular culture. Moving onto the four versions of Mystère Catholique, McKee closely reads the modifications to the body of the Virgin in Denis’s four versions of the painting, interrogating their implications in the larger Crise Catholique in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Finally, considering the original viewing context of Mystère Catholique and Soir Trinitaire, McKee demonstrates Denis’s latent sexual anxiety towards the Virginal archetype expressed privately in his journal and laid bare in his religious painting.