The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle (review)

The Nabis have remained on the margins of modernism. At the end of the nineteenth century the Prophets, as they called themselves privately, formed a diverse, fluctuating group of artists whose most important members were Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard. Katherine Kuenzli’s book ‘seeks to recover the intellectual seriousness and artistic ambition underlying the Nabis’ practice of decoration, and argues for its crucial importance to painterly modernism’ (p. 1). She focuses on the Nabis’ large-scale decorative works, as opposed to their better-known small canvases, since these ensembles pioneered abstraction and communicate through the autonomous and expressive idiom of colour and line. She explores abstraction in the Nabis’ art through a series of interrelated chapters, and some of her keenest insights come from close examination of the paintings as decorative ensembles. For instance, she observes that, in decorations commissioned by Paul and Léonie Desmarais, Vuillard ‘manipulates the female figure, landscape elements, and wallpaper motifs to constitute a series of muted color harmonies and lulling rhythmic patterns’ that ‘spark poetic and musical associations’ (p. 78). She contrasts the Nabis’ approach with that of symbolists such as Gauguin, whose goal was to liberate the artist from the material so as to penetrate the world of the dream. The Nabis, on the other hand, found their subject matter by engaging directly with nature through the senses, and then creating artificial harmonies and patterns to provoke reverie, emotion, or ideas. Kuenzli challenges the notion of the Nabis as simply painters of domestic life: the artists believed that painting in the domestic sphere could renew public culture, and they found sources of inspiration for their decorative works in the public sphere — commercial posters, theatre design, and pursuing the utopian goal of creating a total work of art. In fact, their work for Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art (1890–92) and Aurélien Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre (1893–97) reveals their public ambition and desire to forge a new community; their theatrical designs expressed a collective will that erased the individual creative hand and fashioned a world free of material specificity in order to engage the imaginations of the audience to complete the performance. The Nabis’ efforts to create a total environment through collaborating with Henry van de Velde at Siegfried Bing’s art nouveau exhibit in 1895 were less successful: the group believed that architecture, furniture, and interior decoration should complement painting’s aesthetic expression, whereas van de Velde maintained that the decorated space could replace painting. Perhaps the best chapter is the one analysing four large canvases that Vuillard painted for the private study of the Parisian doctor Henri Vaquez. Kuenzli observes that the images subvert gender and spatial differences in the bourgeois interior and argues persuasively that Nabis’ decorations seek to ‘enable a temporary loss of self ’ (p. 194). In conclusion, she stresses the Nabis’ influence on Matisse, thereby asserting their significance for the metanarrative of modernism. This book makes a notable contribution both in its reading of the Nabis’ decorative ensembles and in its advocacy of the group’s importance to modern art.