In what was a deep part of the avant-garde and scientific exploration of the period, many, including the Nabis
, questioned the program in which three-dimensional space was depicted as a codified projectionthe rules of perspectiveon a flat canvas.
The interaction of the Nabis
with other major movements of the era, including Symbolism and Art Nouveau--and Catholicism in the case of Denis--are among the themes.
15; for a more objective and positive appreciation of, for example, Dionysius I and Nabis
, see Caven 1990 and Cartledge & Spawforth 1989:67-77.
were also considered "decorative" painters, a label that stuck to Bonnard throughout his career.
Although he was unable to go to Europe, his painting takes on as its own a delicate modernity that at times approaches the painting of the Nabis
at the end of the 19th century.
I wish I could say that we were all Nabis
wearing mystic costumes, but we're not that, not at all," he says.
Early in his career, he commissioned albums of colored lithographs--displayed at the beginning of the show--from Bonnard, Vuillard, and their fellow Nabis
, eager to see how they would respond to what was then a relatively new medium for fine--as opposed to commercial--art.
The connections with the Nabis
, the School of Pont-Aven, and Henri Rousseau are well known, but this book pursues them at a pictorial as well as textual level in a most productive manner, and the author also continues her previous quest for Beardsley's 'lost portrait' of Jarry and/or his creation Dr Faustroll.
For example, I would have liked a stronger argument for the connections between Cassatt's project and the work of the Nabis
, a group of artists centered in Paris during the late 1880s and 1890s.
Unde dicit Augustinus, in libro De vera religione: demonstravit nabis
Deus quam excelsum locum inter creaturas habeat humana natura, in hoc quod hominibus in vero homine apparuit.
Herakles and his symbols would henceforth become a fixture of Spartan coinage until the reign of Nabis
at the turn of the 2nd century B.
Although a well-know figure, primarily through his work with the Nabis
in the late nineteenth century, the catalogue stresses that Vuillard created until the mid-twentieth century and left an enormous variety of work: intimate interiors and large decorative panels, portraits and landscapes, drawings and prints, photographs and stage sets.