The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siecle

Abstract

Three groups of Symbolist followers—the Pont-Aven circle, the Nabis, and the Rose + Croix—pursued and extended the Synthetist vision and aesthetic developed by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard in Brittany in the late 1880s. Symbolist works by Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, and others replaced traditional iconography with primitive forms that were intended to evoke natural spirituality and the simplicity of native societies untouched by modern decadence. Artistic Symbolists found highly idiosyncratic and frequently contradictory means to communicate individual moods, emotions and ideas through the expressive use of form, line, and colour. As an art movement, Symbolism defies categorical definition and chronological restrictions. Kuenzli’s focus is the Nabis, surely the loosest of Symbolist groups, in particular Bonnard, Vuillard, and Denis. The study, in hand with a cavalcade of recent scholarship and major exhibitions, seeks to elevate their reputation from mere domestic decorators to profound masters by emphasising intellectual seriousness and their embrace of the Wagnerian experience of totality; that is, the domestic interior as a miniature intimate Gestamtkunstwerk. While considerable evidence of their exposure to and engagement with Wagnerianism is advanced, her insistence upon an agreed and universal Nabis aesthetic is not entirely convincing. Kuenzli’s broad knowledge and interdisciplinary methodology draws on musicology, literature, theatre, religion, history, interior decoration, and popular culture. The detailed analyses of large-scale, multi-panel decorations such as Bonnard’s Women in the Garden (1891), Vuillard’s Desmarais theatre decorations (1892) and Vaquez series (ca. 1895), Denis’s Frauenliebe und Leben (1895), and various collaborative Galerie and Salon de l’Art Nouveau interior decoration projects are exemplary (curiously, Siegfried Bing is misspelled Sigfried throughout). Kuenzli points out that these site-specific works, created for gas-lit Parisian apartments, are rarely shown and fare poorly in modern museum shows. Matisse is identified as the vital link between the Nabis and modernism, with attention drawn to his armchair aesthetic, tile triptych Nymph and Satyr, and Harmony in Red oil painting. While over one hundred illustrations supplement the work, only the dozen in colour provide significant visual impact. Among a spate of other distinguished recent publications on the Nabis are Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (Yale University Press, 2011) and Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940 (Jewish Museum, New York, 2012). A welcome and prominent fixture is Le Musée Bonnard, which opened in Le Cannet in 2011.