Edouard Vuillard - Self-Portrait

Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait, 1892
(Private Collection)

The Nabis' art was a combination of Gauguin's Symbolism and Impressionism. Unlike Gauguin, they did not reject modern life, their subject matter like the croquet game was very much of the moment.  Edouard Vuillard painted a lot of intimate interior scenes involving his mother, sister and his mother's business which she ran out of their home.  He was obsessed with pattern.

Edouard Vuillard must have painted this colorful self-portrait from his imagination though. Obviously his hair was not bright yellow, face pink and beard bright orange.  His whole face has become a pattern, even the odd shape that covers half his face is just for effect.  The dots on the background are decorative elements he paints to give energy and an aura around his head.  He has even broken with the tradition of the canvas always being rectangular.

Vuillard was best known for his interior scenes where the objects and figures are embedded in their surroundings.

Pierre Bonnard - Twilight or Croquet Game

The Nabis were a group of precocious young artists whose close relationship started in school and later on Denis, Bonnard and Vuillard shared an apartment and remained life-long friends.

Pierre Bonnard, Twilight, or Croquet Game, 1892
(Musee d'Orsay)

This painting by Pierre Bonnard is a multi-figure composition, that fits Denis' description of a flat surface covered in a successful combination of colors, surface pattern and emotion with a nature-based subject matter. It is the scene of a croquet game taking place in real time with identifiable figures from his own life- his father, brother-in-law, and sister watching their cousin standing, to make her next shot.  There were many peasant paintings with the title Twilight and in this case it is supposed to be evocative.  It may be emphasizing the paintings melancholic undertones of Bonnard's father, getting old and coming to the twilight of his life.

Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon
(Jacob Wresting with the Angel), 1888
(National Gallery of Scotland)

Pierre Bonnard, like the other Nabis, respected Gauguin and mostly admired his use of color.  In Twilight,  he was looking to Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon, but took his image out of any kind of religious context. Both paintings are structurally very similar.  In the foreground of Vision after the Sermon, Gauguin has the Breton women in the actual reality, and people from Bonnard's life are playing croquet in the foreground of the Twilight.  The upper part of both the paintings are devoted to the realm of the imagination- in Twilight, the dancing women who could be from any time, any place and in Vision after the Sermon, the apparition of the biblical story.

In Bonnard's canvas the figures stand shrouded in vegetation and half light, the surface of the painting, lush greens separated with linear patterns and especially the pattern of the dog in the middle, is a thick tapestry of design.  Similar to Gauguin each area of color and pattern are separate.   The soft, dusky light that permeates Twilight, is actually due to design  than nature, we see the women dancing under carefully shaped forms of yellow and green on the upper right of the canvas.

Bonnard painted Twilight on the grounds of his beloved family home. He used this country home in other paintings as well because he felt it embodied the ideal family harmony.  He is known for his built up surfaces of broad and short strokes in colors of close values and narrative compositions of interiors and gardens inhabited with family and friends.  

The Nabis

"Remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
                                                                      -  Maurice Denis, 1890

Maurice Denis, Climbing Mount Calvary, 1889
(Musee d'Orsay)

Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Serusier, Maurice Denis and Ker Xavier Roussel were a group of eclectic painters that called themselves the Nabis.  They exemplified the cult-like character of Symbolism and they developed their own private language.   The name "Nabis" is from the Hebrew and Arabic word for "prophet."It was given to these artists by poet Henri Cavalis in response to the painters' aim to revitalize painting and become prophets of modern art.  They believed in the idea that art is decoration; for every emotion and thought there "existed a plastic decorative equivalent, a corresponding beauty."

According to the Nabi, painting was first and foremost a harmonious ensemble of lines and colors.  One area of color pattern had to be separated from one another by a line.  They were very influenced by Gauguin.  When Paul Serusier was sojourning in Pont Aven in the summer of 1888, Gauguin was advising him on painting this painting which was to become their talisman.  He was literally leaning over Serusier's shoulder, giving him directions like to paint nature as he saw it, and to use colors straight from the tube.  This image became a charm for them to look at for inspiration.

The Nabis tried to destroy the separation between the fine arts from the decorative arts and thus reunite arts and crafts.  They designed posters, illustrations, theater sets, screens, stained glass, textiles, and ceramics.  They were aspiring to see painting and sculpture as part of a decorative whole and erase the division between art and everyday life thorough the production of functional decorative objects. In time while they maintained their status as avant-garde painters, they also extended the function and language of painting through decoration.  They wished to move painting away from the public sphere into the private world of the interior.1  

Alberti's idea of a painting as a window into a world was not true anymore.  Art was about decoration.  They were thinking of expressing their own individuality by line and color, to create harmony where the subject matter was secondary.

1  Nicholas Watkins, "The Genesis of a Decorative Aesthetic"