Who were Les Nabis? | Art Movement 1889 - 1900

Les Nabis were a group of avant-garde artists in France who exhibited together between 1889 and 1900.

In 1888, Paul Sérusier spent the summer at the artists colony at Port-Aven in Brittany, north-west France. There he met Paul Gauguin. Under Gauguin’s guidance, he painted perhaps his most famous work, The Talisman, in a nearby forest. Back in Paris, Sérusier showed this work to his group of friends, and shared what he had learned from Gauguin.

The friends set up a secret society, Les Nabis (Nabi being a Hebrew word for prophet). The group comprised Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard, Georges Lacombe, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Aristide Maillol and others.

Although the members of the group had a range of artistic styles, they were united by the belief that the artist was a conduit for the untouchable, the spiritual. They followed the simple mantra that a painting consisted of lines and colours combined to work together. As Maurice Denis wrote in his 1890 essay on the group’s philosophy, “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order”.

This simple philosophy allowed many interpretations, though many of the Nabis were influenced particularly by Japonism, following on from artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh, with flat patches of bold colour used to give perspective.

The artists were also united by a love of the esoteric and mysticism, and their meetings were laced with ritual bordering on the occult. Each member had their own nickname, and they even developed their own language. This spiritualism was a common subject for many of the Nabis.

The group held their first exhibition in 1890 titled, ‘The Impressionist and Synthesist Group’. This highlights their influences, the earlier impressionist movement and the symbolism / synthetism of Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, both of whom also displayed works at the exhibition.

Throughout the 1890s, members of the Nabis not only produced paintings, but also worked across the arts, producing theatre sets and costumes, decorative furnishings, ceramics, and illustrating magazines.

Later, he became a teacher at the Académie Ranson, following the death of his friend and its founder Paul Ranson in 1909. Here he taught the principles of abstraction and art theories along with some of the other (former) Nabis.

After their final exhibition as Les Nabis in 1900, the group went their own ways. Although they reamined friends, and some still collaborated, their explosive youth had passed. The age of the Nabis was over.

Looking back at Les Nabis later Vuillard wrote, "The march of progress was so rapid. Society was ready to welcome cubism and surrealism before we had reached what we had imagined as our goal. We found ourselves in a way suspended in the air".

——————————————————————————
Music

Forest Lullabye by Asher Fulero
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_YLJtgH0YA
——————————————————————————

See more of Paul Sérusier here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iwmWCgT_6A

And more of Félix Vallotton here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ta23k-nDUs

——————————————————————————
#Nabis #arthistory #art #Nabi #symbolism #Claritas

Видео Who were Les Nabis? | Art Movement 1889 - 1900 канала Claritas