Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis — and the cast around them

The wider cast of Post-Impressionism begins in October 1888 in the Brittany village we left in Chapter 5. Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), a 24-year-old French painter and a student at the Académie Julian (a private Paris art school founded in 1867 that took the students the École des Beaux-Arts wouldn’t), was on holiday in Pont-Aven and asked Gauguin for a lesson.

Gauguin took him out to a small wood by the river called the Bois d’Amour, set him in front of trees reflected in the Aven, and gave him a small wooden panel — a cigar-box lid. Gauguin’s instruction (as Sérusier later told it to Maurice Denis) was something like: What do you see, that tree? Is it really green? Then use green, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as possible. Use pure color. Don’t blend.

The panel Sérusier brought back is tiny (about 10½ × 8½ inches, oil on wood) and shows flat patches of orange, green, blue and red that read as a landscape only if you already know it’s a landscape. His fellow students at the Académie Julian lost their minds over it. They named the panel Le Talisman and treated it like a religious icon (now Musée d’Orsay, RF 1985-13). And they named themselves, in late 1888, the Nabis — the Hebrew word for “prophets,” picked by a Hebraist friend on the self-mocking ground that they were now the prophets of a new art. The core members were Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and a wider circle of about a dozen. They met weekly at Paul Ranson’s studio (which they jokingly called “the Temple”).

In August 1890, in a periodical called Art et Critique, an essay titled Définition du néo-traditionnisme appeared, signed Pierre Louis (a pen name). It contained the line the 20th century would quote at every student who ever picked up a brush: “Remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or any other anecdote — is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”

Pierre Louis was Maurice Denis (1870–1943), the Nabis’ theorist. He was 19 years old, had been a Nabi for about a year, and had taken Gauguin’s instruction in the Bois d’Amour and condensed it into one sentence: the picture is first a surface with colored shapes on it; then, perhaps, also a story. No single sentence pushed European painting further toward abstraction.

The two Nabis with the longest lives took Gauguin’s flat-color program inward, toward the bourgeois interior, and stayed there for fifty years.

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) painted his lifelong companion Marthe (born Maria Boursin; they finally married in 1925 after thirty years together) over and over — in the bath, in a yellow dress, at the breakfast table. The late Nude in the Bath series (Centre Pompidou; 1925 onward) has Marthe submerged in a clawfoot tub under shifting violet and rose and orange light. Bonnard outlived almost the whole movement and was still painting in Provence into the 1940s.

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) painted smaller, denser interiors, packed with pattern. His mother was a corsetmaker; he grew up among fabric samples, and as a painter he refused to let the wallpaper recede. In Mother and Sister of the Artist (c. 1893, MoMA; about 18 × 22 in), his sister is half-absorbed into the floral wallpaper. The Nabis’ dominant patrons were the Natanson brothers, founders of La Revue blanche (1889–1903), who commissioned decorative panels from Vuillard for their apartments.

One older painter belongs here even though she stood with the Impressionists at every show that mattered. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) — Manet’s sister-in-law and, more importantly, his peer — kept painting through the early Post-Impressionist decade in a hand that loosened year after year. By 1890 her brushwork was as dissolution-prone as anything Bonnard would do; the marks no longer describe a wrist or a curtain, they suggest one. She died of pneumonia in 1895, three weeks after sitting with her daughter Julie through a flu. The death certificate listed her occupation as “no profession.” She had hung in every Impressionist exhibition but the one she missed for childbirth.

The wider Nabi circle ran to a dozen painters this short chapter will not catalog. Three painters outside it belong in the room.

Paul Signac (1863–1935). Seurat’s partner from 1884 onward, the second great Divisionist. After Seurat’s death in 1891, Signac became the propagandist — his 1899 D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme codified Divisionism as a coherent theory. He ran the Salon des Indépendants for almost three decades. His own great picture is Portrait of Félix Fénéon (1890, MoMA): the critic who had named Néo-Impressionnisme rendered as a dapper top-hatted profile against a swirling, dot-by-dot field of colored arabesques.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916). The Symbolist tributary. Until about 1895 he painted noirs — disturbing dreamlike charcoals of floating eyes, spider-faced creatures, monsters. Then around 1895 he switched to pastel and oil, and his late style is the photographic negative of his early one: luminous, saturated bouquets of flowers on dark grounds.

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Pittsburgh-born, French-resident from 1874 onward, the only American in the inner circle of the Impressionist exhibitions (recruited by Degas). Her late work is overtly indebted to Japanese prints — flat color, hard outlines, off-center cropping. The Child’s Bath (1893, Art Institute of Chicago) is the signature canvas: a mother in a striped dress bending forward to wash her young child’s feet in a white china basin, seen from a high vantage that flattens the floor into a decorative pattern.

By 1900 there are not five Post-Impressionists; there are forty or fifty painters working in clusters across France, each pulling away from Impressionism in their own direction. All they need is somebody to walk into the room and put a name on the door.