The Nabis’ lukewarm reaction to these Symbolists was no manifestation of patriotism. Rather they found their work lacking in artistic merit. The French artists who joined the Symbolist movement always paid special attention to the use of colour. Not simply in the work of Gauguin and Redon, whose achievements as colourists were so astonishing that this factor alone makes it impossible to regard their work solely within the framework of Symbolism, but also in that of less gifted artists such as Seguin, who was close to the Nabis. Other followers of Gauguin produced works characterized by a more complex painterly texture, and by more subtle and original colour harmonies. The understanding of the role of colour evinced by the British, German and Belgian Symbolists seemed to the Nabis narrow, or simply dull and academic.
Many aspects of non-academic art also remained alien to the Nabis from a purely colouristic point of view. They were never tempted, for example, to try their hand at Neo-Impressionism. The exponents of this style aimed at achieving the utmost intensity of light, close to reality, using the technique of separate dabs of paint and the optical mixing of pure spectral colours. Colour for the sake of light – that was never an issue for the Nabis, nor was the choice between colour and light. Colour invariably remained of paramount importance for this group of artists. Their colour schemes were most often based on subtle, even elusive gradations of tone, and were in themselves usually rather subdued.
The colour solutions characteristic of the Nabis may be explained by the artists’ attitude towards what they depicted. This attitude was far from the immediacy of the first Impressionists. While rejecting the rapid, casual approach of Monet and Sisley, they remained faithful to accurate visual perception. Their preference was for the eternal rather than the transient. A painting by Bonnard, Vuillard or Denis is, of course, correlated to the object it depicts, but not with it alone. In their works one can always discover a number of subtle associations which place the picture in a definite artistic and historical context. Works by the Nabis are always decorative, and this precludes a naturalistic interpretation of them. At the same time, this decorativeness shows that these paintings belong to an artistic system which is structurally close to other systems. Those other systems may be far removed in time and space, but that fact is irrelevant to their art. In Bonnard’s works we find parallels with Japanese prints, in Denis’s with the murals of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
Such a tendency to look back may at its worst have led to mere stylization. However, Bonnard and Vuillard established fruitful links with earlier art. It was not a matter of iconographic borrowing, though this did take place, but rather a kind of compression of artistic significance: a work is seen not solely as a reflection of the reality surrounding the artist, but also in the context of a long-existing, well-developed tradition, at times very unexpected by the artist’s contemporaries. Denis, the chief theoretician of the group, even invented a word to denote this phenomenon, Neo-Traditionalism. It is easy to see that Denis’s art does indeed fall under this heading. The issue is more difficult with such artists as Vuillard, but in his work too, links with artistic traditions of the past are clearly evident. He owes a great debt to eighteenth-century art, to Japanese woodcuts and to highly decorative French printed cloths. These correlations reveal a very important peculiarity of Nabis art: in comparison with the work of their immediate forerunners, it makes special demands on the viewer and requires a good knowledge of the history of art. An Impressionist picture is easily understood without this, as long as the viewer knows how to look at it.
A new understanding of the aims of painting, determined by a more complex approach to the inner meanings of the image, is one of the most distinctive marks of Post-Impressionism. In some cases the approach owed a great deal to the artistic systems of the East. Although oriental art was only one source of the stylistic changes taking place at that time, it is particularly clear that the Nabis, moving in the same direction as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Redon, and (partly) Toulouse-Lautrec, strove, in contrast to Impressionism, for a synthesis in art, a kind of synthesis which was entirely new in European art. The “synthetism” of Gauguin and other members of the Pont-Avon group, Redon’s experiments which delighted Bonnard and his friends by “a unity of practically opposite qualities, the purest matter and extremely mystic expression”,[7] the visions of Gustave Moreau, usually deliberately theatrical – all these artistic manifestations at the end of the nineteenth century betrayed an anti-naturalistic mood. The Nabis inevitably came to share this mood, although their attitudes towards Redon and Moreau differed. It influenced their art considerably and gave rise to a situation where in a single painting vague allusions could unexpectedly be combined with almost poster-like abstractions. Courbet and the painters of the Barbizon school had avoided using images which could be interpreted in different ways: in short, images outside the world of painting. For the Nabis, on the other hand, the interplay of various styles and images of the past, from the millefiori glass of the late Middle Ages to the colour prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, motifs drawn from legends, mythology and the Gospels, all formed an integral part of their art. This tendency towards a synthesis of artistic concepts was entirely in keeping with the revival of the idea of combining painting with other arts and with architecture.
36. Aristide Maillol, The Wave, c. 1891.
Oil on canvas, 95.5 × 89 cm.
Musée Maillol, Paris.
37. Félix Vallotton, The Saturday Evening Bath, 1892.
Oil on canvas.
Kunsthaus, Zürich.
38. Aristide Maillol, Bather or The Wave, 1899.
Needlepoint tapestry, 101.5 × 92.5 cm.
39. Aristide Maillol, Bather or The Wave, 1896.
Plaster relief, 93 × 103 × 25 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
This idea was current all across Europe. It was not rejected by the academic and salon leaders, but what they offered was the construction of modern works of art based on copying Renaissance and Baroque examples, which merely led to a still-born “historicism”. The creative young artists of Paris were concerned with something entirely different. They dreamt of decorative and monumental painting which would absorb all the colouristic discoveries of the previous two decades. Later Verkade recalled: “Around 1890 a war-cry surged through the studios: ‘We’ve had enough of easel-paintings, down with useless furniture! Painting must not usurp a liberty which isolates it from other arts! There are no paintings, but only decorations!’”[8] What were they to be like, these new decorations? Even beginners in painting realized that merely copying the Old Masters would be no better than the thoughtless transfer of the Impressionists’ brilliant colours onto walls. It was then that many artists’ eyes turned towards Puvis de Chavannes. The seventeen-year-old Denis wrote in his diary: “Yesterday I visited the exhibition of Puvis de Chavannes’ works. The calm, decorative aspect of his pictures is very beautiful: the colour of the walls is delightful, the harmonies of pale-yellow tones are superb. The composition is astonishingly well thought out and lofty; this suggests wonderful mastery. I am sure that above all it is the composition that influences the soul gently and mysteriously, elevating and soothing it.”[9] Not only Puvis de Chavannes’ murals in the Pantheon but also his easel paintings were seen as a lesson in decorative art. Gauguin made a copy of his Hope, and later, on Tahiti, painted two versions of A Poor Fisherman, a work (now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) which was also copied by Maillol, who was close to the Nabis. Even many years later Anna Golubkina, advising her friend and fellow artist L.Gubina what to see in Paris in the short time at her disposal, said: “Don’t