"Le Nabi Tres Japonard"

“In my youth I was swept off my feet by the marvelous pastiche of colours of Japanese crepons, a sort of paper made from material, very folk-art. Long afterwards I realized the beauty of works by the great Japanese engravers: they were much more subdued, but they taught me less about the relationships between pure colors. " - Pierre Bonnard, from a letter to Hedy Hahnloser, a Swiss art collector.

"I understood … that color could express anything, without needing modeling or [three-dimensional] relief. It seemed to me then that it was possible to translate light, form, and character with nothing more than color." - Pierre Bonnard, from  Shimmering Color by Antoine Terrasse,  Skira, Geneva, 1964)

A shy, myopic law student who yearned to be an artist, Pierre Bonnard said "I think what attracted me was less art itself than the artistic life, with all that I thought it meant in terms of free expression of imagination and freedom to live as one pleased."   According to Antoine Terrasse, what attracted Bonnard to Japanese art was "the importance assigned to the personal factor in the making of a picture, the artist’s right to dispense with nature imitation and to rearrange the data of reality, the images his eye has registered, in a new manner determined by his inner vision."

He was, in the phrase of Gustave Kahn, "tired of the quotidian."  And yet, later in life Bonnard spoke of the Nabis' search for "the connections between art and life."  In contrast with the more symbolically inclined members of the group, Bonnard created fresh versions of ordinary subjects, men and women, children, pets, and life in the streets of Paris.  So Bonnard shared an apartment and studio on the rue de Pigalle with the similarly inclined Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis in the early 1890s.

Bonnard borrowed a Japanese technique of highlighting elements of an image through blocks of color  with what different results in  The False Step and The Peignoir.  The first is simple and clear; the second weaves a patterned background around a patterned dress, pointing toward abstraction.  Bonnard jettisoned European techniques of one-point perspective and three-dimensional shading. but used color to give depth to his works. Bonnard professed disinterest in theories of art, for him painting was ‘the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve’  
 Bonnard’s younger sister Andrée was a musician, and her husband Claude Terrasse, a composer and music teacher. In April 1891 Bonnard visited his sister and brother-in-law at the Villa Bach, in Arcachon, and this work may have been conceived there. We may easily imagine him speaking in an aside with Andrée while he painted, with Claude seated nearby, lost in his own thoughts.

After 1900, as the Nabi wave receded, Bonnard remained the truest to the original intention.  His Little Fauns is  a very decorative version of the French landscape, with a wink and a nod to  the classical in the two little creatures who give the picture its name. The French take classical culture very seriously, but not Bonnard.  As Francois Jourdain wrote: "his little fauns look like urchins from the avenue de Clichy."

Unorthodox in his methods, Bonnard painted directly on rolls of canvas nailed to his studio walls, cutting it into its shape after he finished painting.
Images:
1. The False Step, 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
2. Silhouettes. c. 1890-1893, Collection Bernheim, France.
3. Le Peignoir, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Portrait of Berthe Schaedlin,  1892, private collection, France.
5. Claude Terrasse and Andree Bonnard Terrasse, 1891, National Gallery of Australia.
6. The Little Fauns, 1908, Hermitage Museum, Russia.
7. Normandy Landscape, 1920, Unter-Linden Museum, Colmar, France.

The Nabi Dogs Of Pierre Bonnard

"...Proust might not have had

a pet, no self-respecting animal would have let him linger that

long with a madeleine half-eaten  in his fingers." - from Compendium Dachsundium by Matthea Harvey, Everyman's Library, 2003.

Lovable and slightly disreputable, even when domesticated, the Nabi dogs of Pierre Bonnard are irresistible scene stealers.

 Bonnard himself did not have an “irresistible passion for painting”, according to his friend Annette Vaillant, but  after failing to pass his civil service examination and his failure to win the Prix de Rome, his  success with his poster for France-Champagne in 1891 was especially sweet.   And influential - it inspired Toulouuse-Lautrec to give the popular new medium a go. 

Whether pampered pets of the bourgeoisie or scraggly privateers, dogs in Bonnard's work are equally personable.  If these pictures were plays, the dogs would get the best lines.  In Bonnard's affectionate depiction of his sister Andree and her adored dog Ravageau, Andree and Ravageau form a tightly knit group between themselves.  We see Andree again in The Game Of Croquet, dog at her side, part of a tableau where the composer Claude Terrasse is upstaged by the happy pair. The pattern of the leaves looks like paper cut-outs; the flatttened colors and diffuse perspectives are evidence of  the artist's interest in ukiyo-e prints.

On the streets of Paris in the late 19th century fully a quarter of working people labored at the endless making and maintaining of clothing.  In The Little Laundress (1895) the girl carrying a heavy load of clean laundry and the spotted dog are fellows.  Interestingly, a preliminary sketch placed a trio of people standing on the sidewalk, but their removal serves to suggest a correspondence between the two characters.  Painted during the same year Place Clichy could be the little laundress's employer taking her dogs for a walk.  Something about her extravagantly ruffled collar connects this woman and these capering dogs.

Although carefully plotted, Bonnard's street scenes are casual affairs, anecdotes of urban life, ofetn likened to the prints of Ando Hiroshige for the way his characters are flattened on the surface of the picture.  Sometimes the dogs are mere silhouettes but, even so, they exude a liveliness that suggests Bonnard was as captivated by them as we are.

Images:

1. The Women And The Dog, 1891, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.

2. The Game Of Croquet - or -Crepuscule, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

3. Andree and Ravageau, c. 1891, Galerie Vollard, Paris.

4. Woman With Dog, 1897, Courthauld Institute, London.

5. The Little Laundress, 1895, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.

6. Street Scene, Place Clichy, 1895, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

7. Two Dogs On A Deserted Street, 1894, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

7. Street Corner, from the series Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Our Autumn Number Begins Here

Saturdays At the Ransons

At first the Nabis met at  L’Os à Moelle, a bistro known to many of them from their student days at  the Académie Julian.   Soon, they moved their monthly reunions to the studio of Paul Elie Ranson at 25 Boulevard du Montparnasse, a place they jokingly called ‘Le Temple’. Nicknames were adopted, and esoteric words were used as  tokens of group solidarity. to set their pictures apart from the uncomprehending ‘pelichtim’ (bourgeoisie).  The Saturday afternoon discussions of aesthetics were followed by evening visits to Le Chat Noir, to see the shadow theater.  The influence of silhouette and caricature is obvious in in Ranson's most famous image Tiger In The Jungle.  Eventually the playful Ranson included puppet theater at his studio.

It was Ranson who gave  each new member a "picturesque sobriquet" by which he would be known within the group. Serusier was known as ‘Le Nabi ‘a la barbe’,  and Denis known as ‘Le Nabi aux belle Icones,’ Lacombe as ‘Le Nabi Sculpteur’ and so on, each member having a name that reflected how he was seen within the group. Although Pierre Bonnard was dubbed ‘Le Nabi-Japonard,’ Ranson's nickname applied just as aptly to his own work. 

The original group of 1890 was soon bolstered by new recruits, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard, friends from l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and then in 1891–2 by foreign artists, including Jan Verkade (Netherlands), Mogens Ballin Denmark),  Félix Vallotton (Switzerland) and  József Rippl-Rónai (Hungary). Sculptors Georges Lacombe and Aristide Maillol. and a few writers and musicians like Charles Morice  and Pierre Hermant were included. Gauguin, then in Tahiti, was declared an honorary member.

In addition to the monthly dinners Paul  and his wife, Marie-France, who was known as ‘the light of the temple,’ began to host  Saturday afternoon gatherings for the group. Their apartment,  and George Lacombe’s Versailles studio , were the group's two  ergasteriums (a Greek word for a place where work is done.)

Marie-France  was an integral part of the group.  She and Paul worked together to produce tapestries, such as Spring.  Ranson's taste ran to the exotic; he borrowed religious imagery from pagans as well as popes.  

After Paul's death in 1909, Marie-France Ranson continued to teach art at what had become l'Academie Ranson, extending the Nabi legacy to new artists.

Images:

1. Maurice Denis - Madame Ranson With A Cat, 1892, Musee Maurice Denis, St. Germaine-en-Laye.

2. Paul Elie Ranson - Tiger In The Jungle, 1893, Cleveland Museum of Art.

3. Paul Elie Ranson - The Blue Bather, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

4. Paul Elie Ranson - Woman Beside A Balistrade With A Poodle, 1895, Metropolitan Museum of art, NYC.

5. Paul Elie Ranson - Spring - Woman Beneath Blossoming Trees, 1895, needlepoint on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

6. Paul Elie Ranson - Digitalis, 1899, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Georges Lacombe: The Sculptor Nabi Who Painted

He took nature and shaped it with his brushes as deliberately as he carved it in wood.

Marine bleu - Effet de vagues models shapeliness on canvas as well as any sculptor could chisel from marble.  From the three primary colors, Lacombe  created waves fringed with peacock feathered turbulence, flying up in pink mist, as though pointing toward their source in the clouds.   The high horizon may be borrowed from the Japanese prints that Lacombe loved, but it suits Lacombe's intentions.  This, like Lacombe's other paintings, is the  coast of Finistere as he experienced it.  To be sure, the drama was there in Camaret-sur-mer.  The colors were Lacombe's invention but the ocean crashing against jagged rocks was an unceasing natural drama.

Lacombe summered in Brittany from 1888-1897 with his friends Emile Bernard and Paul Serusier, classmates from the Academie Julian in Paris.  At Camaret he met Charles Cottet, who also became a close friend.  Although  there were plenty of painters setting up their easels by the shore, Lacombe was interested only in his individual encounter with the forces of nature.

Georges Lacombe (1868-1916)  was the child of a prominent family from Versailles who made an advantageous marriage.  An extravagantly dressed figure whose wealth spared him from having to sell his works, Lacombe's convictions led him to give his works away. 

When Lacombe turned to human subjects he exercised a designer's hand there, too.  His Chestnut Gatherers in Autumn and Breton Boatwomen go about their work in a patterned landscape, reminiscent of Maurice Denis.

Lacombe thought of himself as a sculptor, firstly, but the paintings he made under the Nabi spell deserve admiration for their restless, rhythmical qualities, quite simply their liveliness.  His early death at the age of forty-eight has contributed to his relative and undeserved obscurity. 

Which brings me to the two little black sheep that charm me. There they are, sole proprietors of vast antique drumlins, enjoying a moment of stillness in an ordinary day.   

Images:

1. Marine bleu - Effet de vagues, 1893, Museum of Fine Arts, Rennes.

2. The Cliffs At Camaret, 1892, Museum of Fine Arts, Brest.

3 The Yellow Sea, 1893, Museum of Fine Arts, Brest.

4. The Violet Wave, 1895, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

5. Autumn - The Chestnut Gatherers, 1894, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

6. Breton Boatwomen, c. 1892, priavte collection, France.

7. The Black Sheep, 1892, Galerie Levante, Monaco.

8. Existence -Birth, c. 1894-1896, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.



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.

A Restless Spirit: Maguerite Burnat-Provins

In her 1909 autobiography Le Couer sauvage (The Savage Heart) Burnat-Provins pays tribute to her father, a cultured man who loved the arts  and encouraged his daughter to make of her own life an original work. She recalled writing dramas and verses from the age of nine. Supported in her intellectual aspirations by her father, Marguerite was a free spirit whose  view of life existed in  tension with a world that was wary of  feminist impulses.  Her divorce from Adolph Burnat and her relationship with Paul de Kalbermattan were at odds with the  values of her adopted home of Valais. As with her contemporaries Colette and Camille Claudel, rumors of scandal attached to Burnat-Provins adventures.

Arriving in Paris at nineteen, she had enrolled in the women's atelier at Academie Julian where the painter Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) became her mentor. In May of 1895 she met Adolph Burnat and his brother, architect Ernest Burnat, from Vevey, Switzerland. The marriage of Marguerite and Adolph, celebrated on Febraury 13, 1896,was mixed in other ways than nationality and cosmopolitanism versus rural:  the Burnats were Protestant and the Provins were Catholic. The couple sttled in Vevey, where they became friends with another painter, Ernest Bieler (1863-1948) who introduced Burnat-Provins to the village of Saviese.  her enthusiasm for the Valais region contrasted strongly with her boredom at Vevey.

Her work, as her personality, tried on various personae. Her version of Art Nouveau was influenced by Symbolism during her youthful Parisian years.  After moving to a farming canton in southwestern Switzerland her vision, though still decorative, appears more conservative, certainly influenced by her subject matter and her relatively tranquil personal life at that time.   Her portrait of her sister Marie-Therese from 1900 presents an ambivalent female image set in decorative foliage:  abundant hair and evident nudity suggest sensuality, yet the eyes and the turn of the lips hint at fragility in this watercolor portrait.

The psychological state that Burnat-Provins described as "la division du moi"  became explicit during wartime but had been  prefigured during an episode of typhoid fever in 1910, while she lived far from home in Egypt. Her fever-induced hallucinations appeared to her as "ames parasitaires" (parasitic souls) engaged in a combat for her spirit between the forces of unity and disintegration.   She visualized them as bird-like creatures with a sinister mien, intensified by their inscrutability.  And although it is obvious in L'Etres de l'Abime and Anthor et l'Oiseau de Noir (posted previously) where the creatures hover and enclose their prey, the sketch at left of a lone winged creature exudes menace.

For Burnat-Provins, art was a means to the creation of a rich vocabulary of images and symbols to portray the inner life.  Because she was an original  and a woman among a  fraternity, her work has been misinterpreted as primitive.  Sophisticated and restless, it is anything but.

Images:

1. Tristesse de l'Amour, 1917, Collection de l'Art-Brut, Lausanne.

2, Poivres d'ornement (Ornamental Peppers), c. 1912, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.

3. La femme a la fontaine, 1898, Sion, Musee cantonale des eaux-arts, Valais.

4. Portrait of Marie-Therese Provins, 1900, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.

5. Bird, 1934, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.

Andre Gide Comes To Le Pouldu

A young man hiking in Brittany stops at an inn in Le Pouldu because he is thirsty. After having something to drink, he decides to look around. “The sparse furnishing and complete absence of wall hangings made it that much easier for me to notice a fairly large number of canvases and stretchers stacked up against the wall. As soon as I was alone, I rushed over to those canvases and turned them around, contemplating each one with increasing pleasure. They seemed to show nothing but childish daubs, but the colors were so unusually bright and gay that I had no other thought than to stay. And so I took a room and asked about the dinner service.”

It was the summer of 1889 and young Andre Gide had just failed his baccalaureate examination in Paris. He was accompanied in his wanderings by his mother, Mme Gide, acting as his chaperone. The inn was called Hotel de la Plage (Hotel by the Beach) and the innkeeper was Mlle Marie Henry, remembered as an intimate of the painter Paul Gauguin The painters were Gauguin, Paul Serusier, and Charles Filiger.

Filiger (1863-1928) is the least known, today, of that trio. Not exactly a Nabi, his work was nourished by his association with them, and then moved away in an idiosyncratic direction, which is pretty much what happened eventually to most of the Nabis.
The son of a wallpaper manufacturer, Charles Filiger studied decorative arts at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Whether Filiger was persuaded to move to Brittany by Gauguin's seductive portrayal of the simple artistic life or by a desire to escape the notoriety occasioned by his homosexuality is unclear, but he arrived at Le Pouldu in 1889.

Inspired by the stark Breton landscape and the devotion of its peasant farmers and fishers, Filiger began developing his visual vocabulary of mystical imagery and Byzantine designs. Buoyed by the friendship of Gauguin, Serusier, and Emile Bernard, Filiger enjoyed rare moments of happiness at Le Pouldu, singing and playing the mandolin. When the group dispersed, Filiger retreated into isolation, moving frequently, his evasiveness and sarcasm in response to hostility to his sexuality, isolating him all the more. A life that spiraled downward into wretched poverty and loneliness ended on January 11, 1928, when Filiger was discovered dead in the street, with slashed wrists, in a small seaside town in Finistere.

And yet, fittingly, Seaside at Le Pouldu, one of his sunniest images and an emblematic Nabi landscape, is how we remember him. We look at it, with its blocks of flattened color and its absence of perspective, convinced that it is a sunny day although we don't see the sun, because what at first appears to be blue sky is revealed by the jaunty little sailboat to be the sea. Here, also, Filiger's Madonnas and angels offer a comforting aspect. The charm and dignity that the blue and gold double frame Filiger made for Head of a Man In A Blue Beret hint at his attraction to Byzantine decoration, a nod to one of his youthful enthusiam.

Images:

1. Paul Gauguin - The Goose, a sign for Hotel de la Plague, 1889, Musee de Bretagne.

2. Charles Filiger - Seascape at Le Pouldu, 1890, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quimper.

3. Charles Filiger - Madonna and Angels, 1892, Maison de Marie Henry, Le Pouldu.

4. Charles Filiger - Head of a Man in A Blue Beret, 1892, Municipal Museum of Pont-Aven.

5. Charles Filiger - Angel with Garland, 1892, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quimper.