Decorative Elements Explored in Exhibit

Art Business News, April, 2001

Created mainly for private European apartments and mansions around the turn of the last century, 85 colorful paintings by four French Post-Impressionists have been brought together for the exhibition "Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930" at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit features works in unusual formats ranging from mural-like and intimate-scale wall and door paintings to folding screens. Coorganized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibit is on view in Chicago until May 16 and will then travel to New York from June 26 to Sept. 9.

Known as decorations, the paintings and folding screens represent both a departure from traditional easel painting and a return to the centuries-old idea of painting as an integral element in interior decor. Professional colleagues and lifelong friends, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and Ker Xavier Roussel were, for a decade, members of the Nabis (Hebrew for "prophets"), a highly influential though quasi-secret brotherhood of artists, musicians and writers active in 1890s France. The artists in this group were guided by Paul Gauguin's belief that all art is decorative and that the artist's goals should not be limited by particular styles, scales or media.

In their search for subjects and a manner that would distinguish their works from traditional easel painting, the Nabis also borrowed from a number of other artistic traditions, including Japanese art, Italian primitivists such as Fra Angelico, the mural paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the contemporary posters and graphic art seen on the streets of Paris. During the 1890s, Bonnard and his colleagues set a goal they would follow throughout their careers: to find a new pictorial expression inspired by traditional mural painting, achieved by harmonious colors, all-over design and matte surfaces, and rejecting the precise subjects, illusionistic modeling and slick finish that typified academic easel painting.

Among the highlights are "Mediterranean" (1911), an enormous triptych by Bonnard, and "Triumph of Bacchus" (1911-13), a colorful single panel by Roussel. Both have not been seen outside of Russia in 90 years.