Nabis

About

The Nabis, from the Hebrew word for 'prophets', formed in Paris in 1888 among students at the Académie Julian. At Pont-Aven that year Paul Sérusier had painted a small landscape in bold, unmixed colour under Paul Gauguin's direction; his friends called it The Talisman (1888) and took it as their lesson. In 1890 Maurice Denis wrote that a picture, before it is a warhorse or a nude, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.

Look for flat areas of colour, strong outlines, patterned surfaces and compressed space borrowed partly from Japanese prints. Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard painted intimate interiors where figures merge with wallpaper and fabrics. Félix Vallotton cut stark black-and-white woodcuts, and Denis and Sérusier leaned towards religious and symbolic themes. The group designed theatre sets, screens, posters and decorative panels as readily as easel paintings, and dispersed by about 1900.