When Decor Exploded: The Nabis in Paris

What a riot of colour! An explosion of sheer outrageous exuberance! The exhibition is called Les Nabis et le Décor, it's on at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and it celebrates a decade or so at the end of the 19th century when a group of young French painters broke down the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts to produce work that was completely original.

Who were the Nabis? Artists such as Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, who wanted to move on from Impressionism, which they saw as being too close to reality. Nabi is Hebrew for prophet, and the Nabis wanted to proclaim a new art. They were fascinated by the flatness of Japanese prints, by the post-Impressionism and innovative use of colour of Paul Gauguin, and they wanted to create contemporary interiors that were utterly at odds with the historical pastiche in vogue at the time.

The aim of this exhibition is to recreate some of those interiors, now largely dispersed. And the curators have succeeded, brilliantly. Because some of what you see is absolutely stunning. And perhaps the most stunning of all is the monumental work by Vuillard in the 1890s for the dining room of businessman and art lover Alexandre Natanson.

Natanson gave Vuillard a free choice of subject matter, and Vuillard, who was working on the theme of public gardens at the time, conceived a cycle of diptychs and triptychs showing modern life in the open air. It must have felt as if you were dining in the park, with nannies shepherding their flocks of straw-hatted children and a perambulator against the fence. The bold patterns of most of the dresses are in stark contrast to the black clothing of the woman on the right, with her red parasol. It's a gloriously open setting, with the trees a wonderful variety of greens.

What a breath of fresh air this art must have been. Two decades earlier, as we saw at Tate Britain a few months ago, another wealthy patron gave Edward Burne-Jones free rein in decorating his London drawing room. Burne-Jones came up with the myth of Perseus, all knights in shining armour and titillatingly unclad damsels in distress. Enough of that, said Vuillard and Bonnard; this is the modern world. 

So no mythological nudes for Bonnard. In the first known decorative ensemble by one of the Nabis, he made a four-panel screen in 1891 with four women in the latest fashions, surrounded by plant motifs in a Japanese-inspired style with flat expanses of colour. We particularly liked the dog accompanying the woman in the spotted dress on the left, caught whirling in mid-turn. But there's something to delight cat-lovers too: See the second panel!

A few years later, Bonnard seems to have embarked on a major project for an immersive decorative installation based on the apple orchards round his family home. There's no record it was ever installed anywhere, but the curators have brought back startlingly acid-green canvases from as far afield as Richmond in Virginia and Kanagawa in Japan. You just want to lose yourself in this verdant countryside, don't you?

It's Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis who are the stars of this show. Denis's Poetic Arabesque was designed for the dining-room ceiling of the painter and collector Henry Lerolle. Denis's fiancée Marthe Meurier is depicted four times in different poses, climbing or perhaps descending the ladder between heaven and earth.

Remember, these works are all meant as interior decorations, and they really are big. But assuming your mansion was spacious enough, you'd love to have them in your home. Whether you could live with Vuillard's Figures in an Interior, though, is very much open to question.

Vuillard made four panels for the library of the Paris apartment of modern-art lover Dr Henri Vaquez. They're full of glorious saturated colour, but they're life-size, and rather intimidating. The oppressive reds of the carpet, the wallpaper, the dresses, the upholstery and the flowers seep into one another. Where Vuillard's garden dining room was airy and outward-looking, this is positively claustrophobic.

We're on the cusp of Art Nouveau here, and a section of this show is devoted to arts-and-crafts designs produced by the Nabis. One of the most striking and charming is Paul Ranson's Ducks wallpaper from the mid-1890s. Quackingly good.

This is not a massive show at the Musée du Luxembourg, but it's packed with interesting stuff. The final section looks at how some of the Nabis became more interested in symbolist and religious themes. One was Paul Sérusier, who painted Women at the Spring as part of a series of panels for his friend, the sculptor Georges Lacombe. A line of timeless female figures are taking water from the source at the bottom of the image to a reservoir further up, as if in some solemn, mystical ceremony depicted in gold, green and orange.

The final highlight, though, comes from Maurice Denis. He was commissioned in 1895 to decorate the study of Baron Denys Cochin, an avid hunter who suggested the subject matter of the legend of St Hubert, in which a stag appeared to Hubert with a crucifix between its antlers, leading him to turn to God.

Denis's cycle of panels mixes the legend with the reality of a late 19th-century hunt, with blue-coated huntsmen (we're in France, not England, remember), members of the Cochin family, and a pack of hounds. And here are the hounds, just behind the deer in the woods, full of the trees in unnatural colours that are so typical of Denis. Gauguin urged his followers to paint the trees the way they saw them, and Denis certainly did that.

It's a fitting climax to a splendid exhibition. We think this show would go down a storm in London, but you'll have to go to Paris to see it.

Practicalities

Les Nabis et le Décor runs until June 30 at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. It's open daily from 1030 to 1900, with late nights every Monday until 2200. Standard tickets cost 13 euros. They are bookable online here, though costing an extra 1.50 euros each. The museum is at 19 Rue de Vaugirard, and Mabillon, Rennes and Odéon are the nearest Metro stations. Luxembourg station on the RER suburban-rail network is also close by.

Images

Edouard Vuillard, Public Gardens (Nannies, Conversation, The Red Parasol), 1894, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Pierre Bonnard, Women in the Garden (Woman in White Spotted Dress, Seated Woman with Cat, Woman in Cape, Woman in Checked Dress), 1891, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Pierre Bonnard, Children Playing with a Goat and Apple Gathering, c. 1899, Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan
Maurice Denis, Poetic Arabesque (Ladder in Foliage), 1892, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Edouard Vuillard, Figures in an Interior: Intimacy, 1896, Petit Palais, Paris
Paul Ranson, The Ducks, c. 1894-95, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper
Paul Sérusier, Women at the Spring, 1899, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Maurice Denis, Panel from The Legend of St Hubert, 1897, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye