b
Granville, 25 Nov 1870; d Paris, 13 Nov 1943.
French painter, designer, printmaker and theorist. Although
born in Normandy, Denis lived throughout his life in
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just west of Paris. He attended the
Lycée Condorcet, Paris, where he met many of his future
artistic contemporaries, then studied art simultaneously at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian
(1888–90). Through fellow student Paul Sérusier, in 1888 he
learnt of the innovative stylistic discoveries made that
summer in Pont-Aven by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. With
Sérusier and a number of like-minded contemporaries at the
Académie Julian—Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel
Ibels and others—Denis found himself fundamentally opposed
to the naturalism recommended by his academic teachers. They
formed the NABIS, a secret artistic brotherhood dedicated to
a form of pictorial Symbolism based loosely on the synthetic
innovations of Gauguin and Bernard. Denis’s first article,
‘Définition du néo-traditionnisme’, published in Art et
critique in 1890 (and republished in Théories), served
almost as a group manifesto and gave a theoretical
justification for the practical and technical innovations of
the Pont-Aven school. With its opening statement, ‘It is
well to remember that a picture, before being a battle
horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat
surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’
(frequently quoted out of context), Denis contributed to the
development of a formalist, modernist aesthetic in the 20th
century. The bold experiments in flat paint application and
anti-naturalistic colour that characterized his early Nabi
work seemed to prefigure later abstract initiatives. Both as
an artist and as a theorist, however, Denis retreated from
the radical position he had adopted as a student in 1890. He
had never denied the importance of subject-matter, and in
his later painting he devoted himself to the revival of
religious imagery. |