Paul Serusier: The Inspired One

1. Nabi  - a Hebrew word usually translated as 'prophet', it can also mean 'the inspired.'    

2.  Talisman -  a  word     originating in the Greek verb to 'initiate into the mysterious', also meaning an object that posesses magical properties.

A painting daubed on the lid of a cigar box, a memento of a summer at the Pont-Aven art colony  in Brittany, became The Talsiman (1888), the beginning of a movement.  Unusual among artists, the Nabis were a self-chosen, self-described group, not the arbitrary creation of critics.

Paul Serusier (1864-1927) chose the name Nabi, suggested to him by his friend Henri Cazalis, a poet whose interest in Kabbalah and eatern mysticism earned him the nickname "Hindou du Parnasse contemporain."  Serusier  hosted monthly dinners where the member artists dressed in oriental costumes and  brought along their latest works.  

A better-known Paul, Gauguin has been credited, perhaps too much, with inspiring the Nabis.  Certainly Serusier was generous in his praise for what he learned that summer with the charismatic Gauguin.  But Gauguin left for the south seas and was not much of a draftsman, while the group that came together around Serusier included artists whose work is the foundation of modern art. 

You can detect certain common features between Gauguin's First Flowers and  Serusier's Talisman.  The simplified shapes, flattened forms, and  complexities of light and  shade reduced to broad areas of color, bounded by clear outlines became common features in the art of the Nabis.  resulted in curvilinear patterns that unified  the picture, denoting the idea of an artificial pictorial unity that sets the work of art apart from mere natural appearances.

The diagonal viewpoint they borrowed from Japanese art, to create more decorative, bold, abstract compositions.  Their philosophy united their disparate styles, with a nod to Baudelaire’s correspondences.  

“Nature merely supplies us with inert materials. A human mind can arrange them in such a way that through them, it can express its feelings and its thoughts by means of correspondences. That is how we arrive at style, the ultimate aim in art.” - Paul Serusier

 Synthetism was conceived as the emotional interpretation of visual experience rather than  imitation, as practiced by realistic painters.  Color and form functioned as independent aesthetic values, symbols pointing toward abstraction. In other words, art as an expression of the artist’s response to experience.    Gauguin and Emile Bernard called this new  style Synthetism.

 “What is a drawing? It is a gesture.” Serusier's succinct definition was expanded in the often quoted dictum of fellow Nabi Maurice Denis: "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." (1890)

In the summer of 1892 Sérusier returned to Brittany and the small village of Huelgoat where he worked for two years. His  subjects were Breton peasants, his palette changed, and he no longer used pure colors, but toned them down with gray hues. “It is was in Brittany that I was spiritually born, ”  Serusier late wrote. For such works  critic Marcel Leblond called the Nabis "the water-diviners of Brittany"  and de Thubert wrote "Serusier thinks like a Celt." (1920)

A Celt who saw a palimpsest of the ukiyo-e or Japanese art of the floating world on the coast of France in The Source and Fishing Boats On The Breton Coast.  We have seen this effect also in the images of Henri de Riviere and Henry de Waroquier, this imaginative correspondence between France and Japan.  Serusier's paintings of Bretons immersed in their daily rounds seem enveloped by an effect that Lawrence Gowing once used to  describe Vermeer's subjects as existing in "an envelope of quiet air."

"I consider it indispensable to transform and to invent"  Serusier wrote in a sympathetic critique of Castel Beranger (Revue Blanche  No 58 – 1899), the first total work of art in France, a building designed by Hector Guimard. 

Images:

1. Paul Gauguin - First Flowers, 1888, private collection (City Review, NYC).

2.. Paul Serusier - The Talisman, 1888, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

3. Paul Serusier - Melancholy, c. 1890, private collection, Paris.

4. Paul Serusier - The Wall, 1890, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

5. Paul Serusier -

5. Paul Sersuier - Two Washerwomen At The Waterfall, 1890, private collection (City Review, NYC.

6. Paul Serusier - Fishing Boats On The Breton Coast, 1892, Josefowtiz Collection, Switzerland.

7. Paul Serusier - The Stream, 1892, Josefowitz Collection, Switzerland.

8. Paul Serusier - Bretons in The Forest At Huelgoat, 1893, Indianpolis Museum of Art.

9..  Paul Serusier - La Barriere Fleurie, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

10. Paul Serusier - The Downpour, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris..

11. . Paul Serusier - Les Mamous - or The Fire Outside, 1893, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris.

12. Paul Serusier - Two Breton Girls Under A Tree In Blossom, 1892, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

13. Paul Serusier - The Grammar - or Studying, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.