Maurice Denis (; 25 November 1870 – 13 November 1943) was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the changing world of late 19th-century European art, Denis is associated with Les Nabis, Symbolism, and later Neo-classicism."Denis, Maurice." Belinda Thomson, Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press. Retrieved 18 June 2014. His theories contributed to the foundations of Cubism, Fauvism, and abstraction. After World War I, Denis founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré (Workshops of Sacred Art), decorated the interiors of churches, and worked for a revival of religious art.
Biography Early life Maurice Denis was born 25 November 1870, in Granville, Manche, a coastal town in the Normandy region of France. His father was of modest peasant origins; after four years in the army, he went to work at the railroad station. His mother, the daughter of a miller, worked as a seamstress. After their marriage in 1865, they moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Paris suburbs. His father was employed in the offices the administration of the Western Railroads in Paris.
Maurice was an only child. From an early age, his passions were religion and art. He began keeping a journal in 1884 at the age of thirteen. In 1885 he recorded in his journal his admiration for the colors, candle light and incense of the ceremonies at the local church. He frequented the Louvre, and admired especially the works of Fra Angelico, Raphael and Botticelli. At the age of fifteen he wrote in his journal, "Yes, I must that I become a Christian painter, that I celebrate all the miracles of Christianity, I feel that is what is needed."Maurice Denis – French Painter (1870–1943), h2g2, 14 June 2007. In 1887 he discovered a new source of inspiration, the works of Puvis de Chavannes.Journal, 18 December 1887
Denis was accepted as a student at one of the most prestigious Paris schools, the Lycée Condorcet, where he excelled at philosophy. However, he decided to leave the school at the end of 1887 and in 1888 enrolled in Académie Julian to prepare for the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he studied with the painter and theorist Jules Joseph Lefebvre. He passed the entrance examination for the Beaux-Arts in July 1888, and passed another examination in November to receive his baccalaureate in philosophy.global.britannica.com
Les Nabis
At the Académie Julian, his fellow students included Paul Sérusier and Pierre Bonnard, who had shared ideas about painting. Through Bonnard, Denis met additional artists, including Édouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Hermann-Paul. In 1890 they formed the artistic group Les Nabis, the name taken from "Nabi" the Hebrew name for "prophet". Their philosophy was based upon the philosophy of positivism and the writings of Auguste Comte and Hippolyte Taine. Denis described in 1909: "Art is no longer a visual sensation that we gather, like a photograph, as it were, of nature. No, it is a creation of our spirit, for which nature is only the occasion."
Denis was first drawn toward the Neo-impressionist style of Georges Seurat, but rejected it as too scientific. In 1889, Denis was captivated by an exhibition of works by Gauguin and others at a Volpini exhibition in a café near the grounds of the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Recalling it later, Denis wrote, "What amazement, followed by what a revelation! In place of windows opening on nature, like the impressionists, these were surfaces which were solidly decorative, powerfully colorful, bordered with brutal strokes, partitioned." The work of Gauguin had an immediate effect on Denis's work. The brightly colored forms of Gauguin's Vache au-dessus du gouffre first shown in 1889, appeared in an October 1890 work by Denis, Taches du soleil sur la terrace, and later in Denis's Solitude du Christ (1918).
The Nabis drifted apart by the end of the 1880s, but their ideas influenced the later work of both Bonnard and Vuillard, as well as non-Nabi painters like Henri Matisse.oxfordindex.oup.com
Modernist
Another influence on Denis at the time was the art of Japan. The interest of French artists in Japanese arts had begun in the 1850s, then was renewed by displays at the Paris Universal Exposition (1855) and was revived again in 1890 by a major retrospective of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts. Even before 1890 Denis had been cutting out and studying the illustrations of the catalog Japan Artistique published by Siegfried Bing. In November 1888 he had declared to his friend Émile Bernard that he wanted to move from "Giving color to (Puvis de Chavannes)" to "making a blend with Japan." His paintings in the Japanese style featured a wide format and very stylized composition and decoration, appearing like Japanese screens.
"A flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" In August 1890, Denis consolidated his new ideas and presented them in a famous essay published in the review Art et Critique. The celebrated opening line of the essay was: "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." This idea was not original to Denis; the idea had been forward not long before by Hippolyte Taine in The Philosophy of Art, where Taine wrote: "A painting is a colored surface, in which the various tones and various degrees of light are placed with a certain choice; that is its intimate being." However, it was the expression of Denis that seized the attention of artists and became part of the foundation of modernism.
Denis was among the first artists to insist on the flatness of the picture plane—a starting point for modernism. However, as Denis explained, he did not mean that form of the painting was more important than the subject. He went on to write: "The profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves...everything is contained in the beauty of the work." In his essay, Denis termed this new movement "neo-traditionalism", in opposition to the Neo-Impressionists, led by Seurat. With the publication of this article, Denis became the best-known spokesperson for the philosophy of the Nabis, though in fact that group was very diverse and had many different opinions about art.
The next major event in the life of Denis was his meeting with Marthe Meurier in October 1890. From June 1891 they had a long romance, meticulously documented in his journal, and were married on 12 June 1893. She became an important part of his art, appearing in many pictures and also in decorative works, such painted fans, often as an idealized figure representing purity and love.
Symbolism
By the early 1890s, Denis had arrived at the artistic philosophy which guided most of his later work, and which changed very little; that the essence of art was to express love and faith, which to him were similar things. On 24 March 1895 he wrote in his journal: "Art remains a sure refuge, the hope of a reason in life from now on, and the consoling thought that little beauty manifests itself in our lives, and that we are continuing the work of Creation....Therefore the work of art has merit, inscribed in the marvelous beauty of flowers, of light, in the proportion of trees and shape of waves, and the perfection of faces; to inscribe our poor and lamentable life of suffering, of hope and of thought."Journal of Denis on 24 March 1895, cited in Bouillon, pg. 25
An independent Salon had been formed in 1884 and in 1890 the official Salon broke into two parts, with the formation of the Société national des Beaux-Arts, with its own annual show. Denis showed his works in both salons, as well as the La Libre Esthétique salon in Brussels, a leading European showcase for avan-garde art. The literary movement called symbolism was launched by Jean Moréas in an article in Le Figaro in 1891. In March 1891 the critic George-Albert Dourer wrote an article for the Mercure-de-France calling Denis the leading example of "symbolism in painting". The work of Denis attracted the attention of critics and of important patrons, most notably Arthur Huc, the owner of the prominent newspaper La Dépêche de Toulouse who organized his own art salons and purchased a number of works by Denis.
Denis experimented with other art forms and with decorative art. Beginning in 1889, to illustrate an edition of the book of poems Sagesse by Paul Verlaine, Denis carved a series of seven highly stylized woodblock prints, distilling the essence of his work. His patron Huc commissioned two large decorative panels, in the form of tapestries, for his Toulouse office. Denis, like other artists of the period, also designed colorful lithograph posters with the arabesque curves of the Art Nouveau.
Beginning in 1891, shortly after his engagement, Denis made Marthe the most frequent subject of his paintings; she was depicted, in purified and idealized form, doing household tasks, taking naps, and at the dining room table. She appeared in his landscapes, and in his most ambitious works of the time, The series called The Muses, which he began in 1893, and showed at the Salon of Independents in 1893. He sold the first painting to his friend Arthur Fontaine; In 1899 The French state acquired one of the paintings, his first official recognition.
Throughout the 1890s, Denis developed a growing interest in the connections between music and art. Marthe Denis played the piano. Denis painted a portrait of his wife at the piano in 1890 and made a lithograph, featuring Marthe, for the cover for the sheet music of La Damoiselle élue by Claude Debussy. He made another lithograph based on the poem Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck, which Debussy had transformed into an opera. In 1894, Denis painted La Petit Air, based on the poem Princesse Maleine by Stéphane Mallarmé, the most prominent literary proponent of Symbolism. In 1893, Denis, in a collaborative project with the writer André Gide, provided a series of thirty lithographs to accompany a long essay by Gide, called Le Voyage d'Urien.
Denis also portrayed the theme of sacred love and profane love. A painting with three female figures, two nude and one clothed, following the model of Le Concert Champêtre and L'Amour Sacré et L'Amour Profane of Titian and Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet. The setting is his own garden, with the viaduct of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the background. The nude figures represented sacred love, and he clothed figure profane love. He made another painting, of Marthe nude in the garden, representing both sacred and profane love in one figure.
Art Nouveau and decorative arts
In the mid-1890s, with the appearance of the Art Nouveau style in Brussels and Paris, Denis began to pay greater attention to the decorative arts, though his themes of family and spirituality remained the same. Many of his new projects were commissioned by Samuel Bing, the art dealer whose gallery gave its name to Art Nouveau. His new projects included designs wallpapers, stained glass, tapestries, lamp shades, screens, and fans. But while he worked within the time period and used the materials of the Art Nouveau, his themes and style remained distinctly his own.
Denis created a series of painted panels for the office of Baron Cochin called The Legend of St. Hubert, painted between 1895 and 1897. The work drew freely upon the Medici Chapel in Florence and the works of Nicolas Poussin, Delacroix, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Cochin and his family appear in one panel, and Denis's wife Anne in another. The panels celebrated families and faith. The Archbishop of Paris celebrated a mass in the office, when the French government nationalized his residence and other church property in 1907.