Les Nabis: The French Brotherhood of Painting Prophets

Feature image: Maurice Denis, Springtime, c.1894-99 via The MET

Les Nabis formed in Paris in the autumn of 1888, when a small circle of students at the Académie Julian decided they had outgrown the academy's lessons in illusion and depth. They took their name, said to have been suggested by the poet Henri Cazalis, from the Hebrew word for prophet, a half-joking title for a group that nonetheless believed it had glimpsed something genuinely new about what painting could be. Over roughly a decade, Les Nabis abandoned linear perspective in favor of flat color, pattern, and decoration, opening a path between Post-Impressionism and the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Félix Vallotton stand at the center of the group, though its full membership stretched across France, Switzerland, Hungary, and the Netherlands. The Nabis never published a single founding statement or adhered to a single consistent style; what bound them was a shared conviction, formed in friendship and in a shared studio space, that painting could convey meaning through color and pattern alone.

The movement's origin point predates the group itself. In the summer of 1888, Paul Sérusier traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany and fell under the influence of Paul Gauguin, who urged him to paint not what he saw but what he felt, using color freed from its descriptive function. Sérusier absorbed this lesson directly under Gauguin's supervision, painting a small landscape on a cigar-box lid, later titled The Talisman, dominated by a saturated, unnaturalistic yellow that bore little resemblance to the wooded hillside in front of him. He carried the painting back to Paris and showed it to his classmates at the Académie Julian, where it became, almost immediately, the group's founding image and self-proclaimed manifesto. Bonnard, Vuillard, and Denis, all enrolled there at the time, were among those most affected, and within a year the loose outlines of a group had formed around Sérusier's example.

From that encounter, a brotherhood formed around Sérusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Paul Ranson, soon joined by Vallotton, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and international members including the Dutch painter Jan Verkade and the Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai. They met weekly in a studio they called the Temple, addressed each other by invented nicknames such as the Very Japonist Nabi for Bonnard, and signed letters with a private set of initials. Membership remained informal throughout, with painters drifting in and out of the circle depending on friendship rather than any formal admission process. Despite the theatrics, the group's underlying conviction was serious: painting did not need to imitate the visible world to carry meaning, and decoration was not a lesser cousin of fine art but one of its legitimate forms.

In 1890, Maurice Denis published an essay titled Définition du néo-traditionnisme, which became the closest thing Les Nabis had to a manifesto. Its central claim, that a painting is before anything else a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a particular order, would later be quoted by generations of modernist critics as an early statement of art's autonomy from representation. Denis insisted he did not mean to elevate form above subject matter; rather, he argued that color and line were already sufficient to carry emotion, without needing to describe a scene faithfully, a method he called a theory of equivalents.

That shared theory did not produce a shared style. One half of the group, Denis, Ranson, and Sérusier, gravitated toward Symbolist subjects with a religious or mystical undertone, drawing on devotional painting and Breton folklore. Ranson filled his canvases with Buddhist and Christian imagery layered together, while Sérusier kept returning to Brittany through the 1890s to paint sorcerers and stylized peasant scenes in the spirit of The Talisman.

The other half, Bonnard and Vuillard, moved toward something quieter, a style later called Intimism. Rather than myth or symbol, they painted domestic interiors, gardens, and the small rituals of middle-class Parisian life. Vuillard's The Seamstress and Public Gardens let their human subjects blend into the wallpaper, dresses, and foliage around them, until figure and pattern become hard to tell apart. Bonnard worked in much the same way, returning again and again to scenes of his companion, and later wife, Marthe de Méligny, at home. That habit of looking, letting decoration carry as much weight as the figure, would stay with him for decades, long after the Nabis themselves had disbanded.

Les Nabis took their visual vocabulary in large part from Japanese woodblock prints, which had circulated in Paris since the 1867 World's Fair and influenced a wide swath of French painting under the term Japonisme. The flat picture plane and bold outline of ukiyo-e prints gave the group a model for rejecting the Renaissance tradition of painting as a window onto illusionistic space; Vallotton's woodcuts carried this debt directly into printmaking, while Bonnard's posters and lithographs for La Revue Blanche extended the same flattened logic into mass-reproducible graphic design.

That same instinct led Les Nabis to refuse any real separation between fine art and the decorative arts, a position that aligned them with contemporaries in Art Nouveau. Members designed posters, book illustrations, and sets for the Symbolist theater, but their clearest decorative achievement came through large-scale domestic commissions meant to be lived with rather than simply viewed. Maurice Denis's April (The Anemones), painted for a young girl's bedroom as part of a four-panel cycle on the seasons of a woman's life, is a good example: a flattened, dreamlike garden scene built from soft color and pattern rather than realistic depth, designed to wrap around its viewer the way wallpaper or a tapestry might. Vuillard and Bonnard took on similar commissions for private patrons, treating an entire room as a single composition rather than a wall for hanging separate paintings.

Les Nabis never operated as a unified school with a single doctrine, and the loose structure that made the group so productive in its first years also made its dissolution gradual rather than dramatic. Political division accelerated the drift: Bonnard and Vuillard were vocal supporters of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, while Denis and Sérusier sided with the army, a split that strained relationships built on a decade of close collaboration even though the group's founding spirit had been deliberately apolitical.

By 1900, most members had moved toward independent careers. Denis turned increasingly to religious commissions and academic theory, publishing his collected writings as Nouvelles théories sur l'art moderne, sur l'art sacré in 1922. Vuillard shifted toward a more naturalistic style suited to portrait commissions from wealthy patrons. At the same time, Bonnard, the longest-lived of the group, continued to develop his Intimist style largely outside public exhibition until his death in 1947. Looking back decades later, Vuillard reflected that society had been ready to welcome Cubism and Surrealism before Les Nabis had reached the goals they had once imagined for themselves, leaving the group feeling suspended between two eras of French art.

The movement's influence outlasted its decade of activity. Henri Matisse absorbed the Nabis' flattened color and decorative ambition into his own early Fauvist work, and design historians have traced a clear line from Nabi wallpaper and stage design to the broader development of Art Nouveau. The Musée d'Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have both mounted major exhibitions reassessing the group's decorative output, treating works once dismissed as minor commissions as central to understanding what the Nabis were trying to accomplish. Tate Modern's retrospective of Bonnard and a parallel Vuillard exhibition at the Holburne Museum have further renewed interest in the two artists most associated with Impressionism, even as scholarship continues to recover Denis, Sérusier, Ranson, and Vallotton as equally serious participants in the same project.

Les Nabis is remembered as an unusual group bound less by a common style than by a shared refusal to treat painting as a transparent window onto reality. That refusal, formalized in Denis's insistence that a picture is first a flat surface of color, anticipated a line of thinking that would run through Fauvism, Cubism, and well into pure abstraction, even though the Nabis themselves never abandoned the figure or the domestic scene. Their insistence on dissolving the hierarchy between painting and the decorative arts also reads, from the present, as remarkably prescient, closer to how artists today move freely between canvas, textile, print, and design than to the rigid categories their own teachers had tried to enforce. Les Nabis were not a minor footnote between Impressionism and Modernism but one of the clearest hinges connecting the two.

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