Maurice Denis
Taches de soleil sur la terrasse, en 1890
Musée d'Orsay
© Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt / DR
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He always claimed that his constant and sometimes anxious search to accommodate his decorative ambitions gave his work a coherence seen right through from his early symbolism to the later paintings, and even in his numerous writings. For Denis, this coherence was to be found in the systematic and exclusive use of a picture's essential components (plane, colour, composition) alongside the demands of constantly changing subjects, be they linked to his catholic faith, to a description of modern life or to the personal iconography he developed from the 1890s onwards.
This is really what the purpose of the exhibition: to restore Denis to his rightful place of eminence, and to make a serious reassessment of how his work is viewed, by following the strands linking his earliest work with later developments, the small Nabi paintings with the large decorative pieces.
Triple portrait de Marthe fiancée, 1892
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Municipal en dépôt au Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Le Prieuré, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
© DR
From the beginning of the 1890s, the Nabis were, according to Verkade, calling for "walls, walls for decoration". Denis painted ceilings and panels, as in April (ceiling for Chausson) or Forest in Spring and Forest in Autumn - in imitation of a tapestry.
Denis frequently used to recount the origins of the Nabi movement, created in the aftermath of the furore provoked by the Talisman (Paris, Musée d'Orsay, former Maurice Denis collection), a small landscape with an emblematic title painted by Sérusier under the guidance of Gauguin. Along with Puvis de Chavanne, Fra Angelico and the Ingrists, Sérusier was a seminal figure for the young Denis. Like his Nabi friends, Denis produced more and more small paintings, each more audacious in its application of the new aesthetic: flat surfaces of bright colour, a radical simplification of shapes, absence of perspective, Japanism and Synthetism. One room brings together about fifteen of these "Nabi icons" painted by Denis in the 1890s. They show a rare freshness and freedom of execution. Some have not been exhibited before.
His symbolist compositions and decorative works benefited from this research, which he used for an art which was becoming increasingly monumental and reasoned. His trip to Rome in 1898 with André Gide confirmed the move towards a classical revival, encouraged by the art of Raphael and Cezanne.
Jeu de volant, 1900
Musée d'Orsay
Legs Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1927
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Thierry Le Mage
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The turning towards classicism becomes clear in the dazzling paintings of beaches where the atmosphere is close to that in his photographs, taken at the same time. There is an exhibition room dedicated to these. It opens with the first work in the series painted at Perros-Guirec in 1898, Women bathers, Perros currently at the MOMA in New York.
Denis' beaches are also meant as a critical reply to Matisse. Denis tries to define a community art, which maintains balance, sensuality and order, between the constraints of the subject, the feeling for nature and decorative imagination. He strives to achieve this both in his easel paintings and in his murals.
At the end of this chronological sequence, there is a display of landscapes painted between 1898 and 1943. They manage to show how a taste for simplicity and synthesis transform the reproduction of nature. On display for the first time is one of his last paintings, a Vue du Reposoir (private collection) painted in pure Nabi spirit a few weeks before his death.
La Légende de saint-Hubert. Le défaut, 1865
Collection Musée d'Orsay - Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers
Legs Alfred Chauchard, 1909
© PHOTO RMN - THIERRY LE MAGE © DR / DR
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Denis magnificently lays out the path of the life of a woman, from betrothal to the consecration of motherhood, punctuated by mysterious views of a heavenly garden.
Following this is The legend of Saint Hubert (musée départemental Maurice Denis), created in 1897-1898 for Baron Henry Cochin. This symbolic hunt marks a turning point in the work of the painter, who, for the first time, is confronted by such huge formats. The success of this project won him the admiration of Ivan Morosov, who then commissioned him to do what was to be one of his most spectacular private decorative works: The Story of Psyche.
Presented in part in 1908 and in Paris in 1909, before been installed in Moscow, the complete work has never since been seen in France. For this decorative work, Denis had asked Maillol to whom he was very close at that time, to do four bronzes, similar to the first sculptures, to go with Denis' exceptional panels, now in the National Museum of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.