The Art Exhibitions Blog

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 ...

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 succ...