Although Denis did not mention Gauguin and his painting in his journal, the recognizable style of Gauguin’s Tahitian woman hung on the back wall in Hommage à Cézanne reveals the clues of their relationship.
As it has been mentioned in my previous chapter, Gauguin, Sérusier, Denis and Bernard used one after another Cézanne’s still life Compotier, verre et pommes as a pictorial dialogue. Their collective interest shaped their circle as well as their collectivity. Gauguin’s choice to appropriate Cézanne’s still life indeed had influenced and inspired Denis. His important status toward the young generation had determined the development of their early period.
However, the relationship between Gauguin and the Nabis was likewise mixed.
Called “Le Nabis en mission à Tahiti” by Paul Ranson,167 Gauguin was not merely an influential leader to the young group, but he was considered one of its members. He had played an important role for the Nabi generation in their early development,168 and his theories as well as his contact with Sérusier at the end of the 1880s determined the direction of the Nabis’ philosophy and practice,169 helping the young generation
167 Letter from Ranson to Verkade, October- November, 1892, quoted from Guillermo Solana, Richard Shiff, Guy Cogeval, Maria Dolores Jiménez-Blanco (ed.), Gauguin and the origins of Symbolism, London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004, no. 117, p. 63
168 In June 1886, a group of young artists such as Charles Laval, Ernest Chamaillard, Henry Moret, Émile Jourdan, Paul Sérusier and young Émile Bernard all gathered around Gauguin in Pont-Aven when he first went to the village in Brittany. They were influenced by Gauguin’s cliam on art. Latter, when Paul Sérusier went back to Paris with his famous Talisman which was under the instruction from Gauguin, the Nabi group was founded in the summer, 1888.
169 Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian avant-garde, New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University press, 1988, p. 83; as the organizer of the Nabi group, Sérusier mattered most to the Nabis as a theorist. He wrote to Denis with his passion of their group in 1888: “Welcome! I am
dreaming of a pure brotherhood in the future, consisting entirely of artists who are confirmed devotees
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to realize that a picture should not really be a faithful description of nature.170 For Gauguin, a picture should be created mainly by imagining and abstracting from life.
Actually, Gauguin had played a crucial position in Sérusier’s expression and theorization on art. As Sérusier commented his famous Talisman which was under the guild of Gauguin’s idea:171 “…the impression of nature must be wedded to the esthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies, and synthesizes. The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination…begotten by the union of his mind with reality…Gauguin insisted on a logical construction of composition, on a harmonious apportionment of light and dark colors, the simplification of forms and proportions, so as to endow the outlines of forms with a powerful and eloquent expression…”172 As one of the original founders of the Nabis, Sérusier had promoted Gauguin’s artistic ideas to his colleagues constantly.173 As a result, most of the Nabi members were influenced by Gauguin directly and indirectly.
Despite of the diversity of national, political, philosophical, and religious
of the beautiful and the good, taking as the foundation of their creative work and their conduct that quality which is hard to define, and which I call by the word Nabi.” Quoted from Natalia Brodskaya, Félix Vallotton: the Nabi from Switzerland, Parkstone, Bournemouth, England: Aurora Art Publishers, 1996, p. 64
170 As one of the Nabis members René Piot once memorialized: “When we were students at Julian, Sérusier invited Maurice Denis and me to lunch with Gauguin. During dessert, the latter, irritated because we innocent students were too slow in grasping new ideas, lost his temper. He [Gauguin]
dipped his finger in the ink-pot and, on the clean white tablecloth — to the despair of the waiter — he drew a circle and, pointing to a dish of apples, shouted: “For goodness’ sake, that’s not an apple, it’s a circle!” He wanted to impress on us for once and for all the battle between the object as a plastic entity and as a narrative entity.” René Piot, “Les cubistes”, in Bulletin du Salon d’Autome, no. 5, 1917, quoted from Caire Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard and Their Circle, Paris: Flammarion, 2002, pp. 66-67
171 In 1888, Sérusier met Gauguin at Pont-Aven and, under his direction and guidance, used pure and strong colors applied in flat areas for landscape. Sérusier painted a small landscape in an entirely Synthetist technique. After that, he bore off this little picture to Paris, where it was promptly baptized Talisman, and started preaching the new doctrine to a circle of friends.
172 Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian avant-garde, New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University press, 1988, p. 85
173 Denis latter remarked Sérusier’s coherent influence from Gauguin toward the Nabis: “Il(Sérusier) s’attache alors à dècouvrir le lien des différentes formules que vivifient la parole et l’art de Gauguin. Il y met de l’ordre, li les systématise, il entire une doctrine qui d’abord se distingue mal de
l’impressionnisme, avant d’en devenir l’antithèse; et cela se passe précisément àl’époque où de la réunion des peintres et des poètes naît le Symbolisme.” Quoted from Maurice Denis, “Le peintre Paul Sérusier”, in Maurice Denis, Jean-Paul Bouillon (ed.), Le ciel et l’arcadie, Paris: Hermann, éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1993, p. 152
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backgrounds, the Nabis group found with Gauguin a denominator at the beginning of their foundation.174
Later, Denis corroborated Gauguin’s influence toward their group: “And so we were introduced, in a paradoxical and unforgettable form, to the fertile concept of the flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. And so we learned that any work of art was a transposition, a caricature, the impassioned equivalent of a considered as the archetypal symbolist prophet-leader whose superhuman powers would revitalize modernism.177 Since he was considered to be a part of Symbolism, the young Nabis intended to move their courage to logical conclusions in developing
174 The members of the Nabis included Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, René Piot, Georges Lacombe, Maxime Pierre Dethomas, the Swiss Félix Vallotton, the Dutch Jan Verkade and Meyer de Haan, Ariside Maillol, and the Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai. As Octave Mirbeau wrote: “…[The Nabis] they are quite different in their own inclinations, their own temperaments and their own education, and have a very respectful attitude to the efforts of their predecessors.” In fact, Denis was a fervent Catholic all along, while Verkade and Ballin converted to Catholicism: Verkade from Protestantism, becoming a monk and departing to join monastic life in Beuron in 1895, and Bellin from orthodox Judaism. The anticlerical Ranson was a theosophist and a devotee of the occult. Lacombe was also anticlerical and Sérusier managed to be both Catholic and theosophist at the same time. Roussel, Ibels, and Vallotton were sympathetic to the anarchist cause, while most of the Nabis, including Bonnard and Vuillard, were less obvious in their expression of political sympathies. See Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian avant-garde, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University press, 1988, p. 4
175 “Ainsi nous fut présenté, pour la première fois, sous une forme paradoxale, inoubliable, le fertile concept de la surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées. Ainsi nous connûmes que toute oeuvre d’art était une transposition, une caricature, l’équivalent passionné d’une sensation reçue. Ce fut l’origine d’une évolution à laquelle participèrent immédiatement H. G. Ibels, P.
Bonnard, Ranson, M. Denis.” Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian avant-garde, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University press, 1988, p. 83; French version from Maurice Denis, Jean-Paul Bouillon (ed.), “L’influence de Paul Gauguin”, in Le ciel et l’arcadie, Paris : Hermann, éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1993
176 Albert Aurier’s famous article “Le Symbolisme en peinture — Paul Gauguin” in Mercure de France had exemplified the aims of the Symbolist aesthetic. See G. –Albert Aurier, “Les peintres symbolistes”, in Revue encyclopédique 2, no. 32 (1 April 1892), pp. 474-86
177 See my chapter two. Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence: the painter in his culture, Chicago & London: The university of Chicago, 2003, p. 236
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a new visual language that can convey Symbolist concepts. In short, the Nabi group was founded expressly to develop means that can express visually subjective sensations of the natural world.178
Hence in the pursuit of the ideal symbolist model, the young generation took Redon’s fantastic expression as their objective. Especially Albert Aurier related Gauguin, Redon, Symbolism and the Nabis in a connected circle. In his famous essay, Aurier predicted that the Nabi artists would fall under the spell of Redon’s symbolism much as they already had with the synthetism of Gauguin.179 Albeit Aurier’s transition between Gauguin and Redon, he identified five distinguishing features of the new “pictorial Symbolism” which was derived from his study of Gauguin’s work.180 Aurier’s claim made further efforts to nominate Gauguin and Redon as the
178 Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian avant-garde, New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University press, 1988, p. 81. For their artistic communication, the Nabis even employed a ritualistic jargon in their correspondence, and signed letters with the initials “D. T. P. M. V. E. M. P.”, meaning “Dans ta paume mon verbe et ma pensée”.
179 Aurier published his famous article “Le Symbolisme en peinture — Paul Gauguin” in Mercure de France in 1891. His prediction clearly indicates that Redon will dominate the young generation:
“Among the bearer of the good word that the young love to evoke, another artist, as original, as profoundly idealist, even stranger and more terrifying, who, through his love of dreaming and spirituality, had to effect, if not as immediately as the preceding [artists], at least by rebound, the orientation of the new souls of today’s artists: Odilon Redon.” Quoted from Annette Leduc Beaulieu, Brooks Beaulieu, “The Thadée Natanson panels: a Vuillard decoration for S. Bing’s maison de l’Art Nouveau”, in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn, 2002,
http://19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn02/260-the-thadee-natanson-panels-a-vuillard-decorati on-for-s-bings-maison-de-lart-nouveau accessed in 12 March, 2012; French version “Parmi les annonciateurs de la bonne parole, qu’aiment à invoquer les jeunes, un autre artiste aussi original, aussi profondement idéaliste, encore plus étrange et plus terrifiant, qui, par son hautain mépris de l’imitation matérielle, par son amour du rêve et de la spiritualité dut agir, sinon aussi immédiatement que les précédents, du moins par contre-coup, sur l’orientation des neuves âmes d’artistes
d’aujourd’hui: Odilon Redon.”, G. –Albert Aurier, “Les peintres symbolistes”, in Revue encyclopédique 2, no. 32 (1 April 1892), pp. 474-86
180 “A work of art…must be (1) idéiste, since its unique aim is to express the idea; (2) symbolist, since it expresses this idea by means of forms; (3) synthetic, since it arranges these forms or signs in order to facilitate general comprehension; (4) subjective, since the object is not considered as a thing in itself but as a sign of an idea apprehended by the subject; and (5) it follows that it must be decorative — for what is decorative painting but a manifestation of art that is subjective, synthetic, Symbolistic, and idéiste.” French version is “Donc, pour enfin se résumer et conclure, l’oeuvre d’art telle qu’il m’a plu la logiquement évoquer sera: (1) Idéiste, puiste son idéal unique sera l’expression de l’Idée; (2) Symboliste, puisqu’elle exprimera cette Idée par des formes; (3) Synthétique, puisqu’elle écrira ces formes, ces signes, selon un mode de compréhension générale; (4) Subjective, puisque l’objet n’y sera jamais considéré en tant qu’objet, mais en tant que signe d’idée perçu parle sujet; (5) (C’est une conséquence) décorative— car la peinture décorative proprement dite, telle que l’ont comprise les Egyptiens, très proprement les Grecs et les Primitifs, n’est rien autre chose qu’une manifestation d’art à la fois subjectif, synthétique, symboliste et idéiste.” Quoted from Albert Aurier, “Le Symbolisme en
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prime exponents of the new school of the coming age.181
From the above discussion, it seems that the close relationship between the Nabis and Gauguin, as well as Denis’ engagement with the French Symbolist discourse led him to seek out the strategy in putting Gauguin’s painting in Hommage à Cézanne. Since Denis had planned to put Redon as one of the major figures in his work, Gauguin’s painting positioned in the background seems to imply their early relationship with Symbolism and their intimate friendship. A convincing explanation of their connected relations is demonstrated by the strategy of pictorial dialogue they adjusted within two decades.182 In this point of view, as an early Symbolist prospector and a leading master for the Nabis, Gauguin’s importance is insinuated through the style of his painting and his innovative appropriation of Cézanne’s still life in Denis’ group portrait. He is an invisible crucial figure that can not be ignored in Hommage à Cézanne.