Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life

[Paul Gauguin taught us] that every work of art was a transposition, a caricature, the passionate equivalent of a received sensation.
—Maurice Denis, 1920

In late fall of 1888 in Paris, a group of young, like-minded art students banded together after seeing a small abstract landscape by Paul Sérusier that he had made under the guidance of Paul Gauguin. Serusier’s boldly-colored composition, built up from broad patches of greens, yellows, blues, and reds arranged decoratively on the flat surface of a cigar box lid, marked a radical break from the naturalistic palette and broken brushwork of the Impressionists. 

By the time of their first exhibition in 1891, the group had assumed the moniker “The Nabis,” a transliteration of the Hebrew navi meaning “prophet.” Their visionary approach asserted the primacy of form and color as abstract equivalents of human feeling. The Nabis’ emphasis on an artistic language of suggestion was in sympathy with the ideals of Symbolist writers, poets, and musicians, with whom the Nabis closely collaborated.

Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life, drawn from the promised gift to the Phillips from the collection of Vicki and Roger Sant, explores rarely-seen works by some of the international group’s leading figures, including Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Félix Vallotton. From painting and prints to stained glass, screens, tapestry, and ceramics, the works exemplify how the Nabis employed flat colors, decorative patterning, and silhouetted forms to convey their responses to the world. 

During their short-lived, yet fertile period of collaboration that lasted until around 1900, the Nabis created a wide range of imagery, from the mystical to the mundane, the witty to the sardonic. In seeking to break down the artificial barriers between the fine and decorative arts, the Nabis poignantly captured the poetry of everyday life as it played out in living rooms, street corners, gardens, and landscapes.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Pierre Bonnard, Stork and Four Frogs (Le marabout et les quatre grenouilles), 1889. Three-panel screen; distemper on canvas, 62 3/4 x 21 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, promised gift of Vicki and Roger Sant