MAURICE DENIS

ART

 

MAURICE DENIS French 1870-1943

Maurice Denis was a French painter and writer, and a member of the Symbolist and Les Nabis movements. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art.

Maurice Denis was born in Granville, a coastal town in the Normandy region of France. It has been considered surprising that such an avant-garde figure like Denis should be so influenced by the religious subjects, this interest continued throughout his life. Even as a teenager he was known to say "Yes, it's necessary that I am a Christian painter, that I celebrate all the miracles of Christianity, I feel its necessary.” Denis’ Christian influences included the art of Christian imagery by the Early Italian Renaissance painters, these influences can bee seen in some of his iconography and his choices of colour in these lithographs. The colours are restrained with a great sense of subtlety, especially in the soft edges employed to depict the figures.

Denis attended both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, where he studied under the painter and theorist Jules Joseph Lefebvre. At the Académie, he met his future Nabis members, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard; and through Bonnard he met the Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel. In 1890, they formed The Nabis. The Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist artists and illustrators who became very influential in the field of graphic art. Their emphasis on design was shared by the parallel Art Nouveau movement. Both groups also had close ties to the Symbolist painters. The core of Les Nabis was Pierre Bonnard, Ker Xavier Roussel, Felix Vallotton, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard. They held secret meetings and set up their society in 1890.They chose "Nabis"—Hebrew for "Prophet"—because they understood they would be creating new forms of expression.

Within the Nabis movement his famous proposal for the flatness of the picture plane, he is quoted as saying in his manifesto "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order."

There are 371 paintings by Denis in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the collection does not include his graphic works which are held in the Louvre.

In 1980, the Maurice Denis Museum was opened in the artist's home in the Parisian suburb Saint-Germain-En-Laye.

http://www.musee-mauricedenis.fr