What Colour Is That Tree? Sérusier's Talisman at the Musée d'Orsay

One of the most exciting exhibitions on in Paris at the moment is Les Nabis et le Décor at the Musée du Luxembourg, showing how Vuillard, Denis, Bonnard and others created truly stunning interior designs in the final decade of the 19th century. The Nabis took their name from the Hebrew word for prophet, and if you want to see how they were inspired, the place to go is the Musée d'Orsay, where there's a show centred on the painting that sparked an artistic revolution.

It's called Sérusier's The Talisman, a Prophecy of Colour, and the picture is just 27 x 21 centimetres, painted in oil on wood by Paul Sérusier in October 1888.

Sérusier was staying in Pont-Aven in Brittany with Paul Gauguin. Earlier that year, he'd been painting in a fairly conventional style, as we see elsewhere in this show, but now, as Maurice Denis related a decade and a half later, he listened to the guidance Gauguin gave him: "How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion."

The result, painted using flat blocks of pure colour and simplified forms, is a picture that at first appears abstract and becomes clear as a landscape, with the river, trees, path and a mill, only after some degree of examination; perhaps not too difficult for us, but ground-breaking in an era when Impressionist art still remained a pretty instantly recognisable representation of what was on the other side of the easel. 

Back in Paris, Sérusier showed the picture to Denis and his other fellow young artists at the Académie Julian. They adopted it as a sort of talisman to point the way for their future work, which they intended should be as radical as possible.

It was at this period that artists led by Gauguin and Emile Bernard were creating a new style known as Synthetism: a synthesis of the external appearance of nature, the artist's feelings about it and the aesthetics of line, colour and form. "Don't copy nature too closely," Gauguin wrote. "Art is an abstraction. As you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create rather than the result."

So what colour is Bernard's tree? It's definitely yellow in this painting from 1888. And what a blazing yellow it is when you see it in the flesh.

Of course, it wasn't just a redefinition of the depiction of nature in this new age of daring art that was dawning at the end of the 1880s. Some of the Nabis' work had distinct spiritual overtones, particularly that by Denis.

In Calvary, Denis has painted a faceless Christ with the cross at the top left of a diagonal of what appear to be grieving women, who are also depicted as flat blocks of colour. The Roman soldiers form another slab on the right, distinguishable only by their standards. The subject matter is clear but there's something rather disturbing about the image; is it because the women appear to be nuns?

The best pictures in this show, though, are the landscapes. Denis's The Sweepers gives us some orange trees in a snowy February scene, while in The Green Trees, it's the trunks that the title refers to. "A painting, before being a war horse, nude woman or any sort of anecdote," Denis said, "is fundamentally a flat surface covered in colours assembled in a certain order."

And what of Sérusier? Well, here's one painting made a decade on from The Talisman that appears to illustrate Denis's point. Even more abstracted, there's a strip of green for the trees, a layer of blue sky, an expanse of gold for the wheat before we actually get close up and see the detail of the buckwheat. It's essentially a decorative panel, of the sort on view at the Musée du Luxembourg.

But for us, perhaps the most stunning image in this show came from a little-known name: Georges Lacombe. He merits six sentences in the English-language version of Wikipedia, and not that many more in French. But what a terrific assemblage of colours in a certain order Blue Seascape, Wave Effect is. The younger sibling of Hokusai's Great Wave topped off with a peacock's tail of foam about to hit the beach.

What colour is that sea? It's so blue.... Well, we are in France, after all.

Practicalities

Sérusier's The Talisman, a Prophecy of Colour runs at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris until June 2. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 0930 to 1800, with late opening on Thursday until 2145. Full-price tickets to the museum and all exhibitions are 14 euros and you can get them online (valid for three months from date of purchase) here. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month (so that's the final day, June 2, but it will be crowded!) as well as for under-25s living in an EU member state.

The Musée d'Orsay is on the south bank of the River Seine just across from the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, and it has its own station on line C of the RER suburban-rail network. Solférino station on line 12 of the Metro is also close by.

Also on at the Musée d'Orsay

Don't miss the enlightening show about Black Models in art since 1800, featuring work by Manet, Géricault and Matisse and retelling a neglected history.

Images

Paul Sérusier, The Talisman, the Aven River at the Bois d'Amour, 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski
Emile Bernard, The Yellow Tree, 1888, Musée des Beaux Arts de Rennes. Photo © MBA, Rennes, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Adélaïde Beaudoin
Maurice Denis, Calvary, also called Road to Calvary, 1889, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski

Paul Sérusier, Field of Golden Wheat and Buckwheat, c. 1900, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt

Georges Lacombe, Blue Seascape, Wave Effect, c. 1893, Musée des Beaux Arts de Rennes. Photo © MBA, Rennes, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-Manuel Salingue