Decorative painting in France

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

At the turn of the twentieth century in Paris a group of painters known as the Nabis were united in the goal of tearing down the aesthetic barriers that separated the fine and decorative arts. As Pierre Bonnard wrote, "Our generation always sought to link art with life. At that time I personally envisaged a popular art that was of everyday application: engravings, fans, furniture, screens, etc." With this end in mind, Bonnard and his colleagues Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel painted murals and screens, and created designs for stained glass for specific locations in both public buildings and private houses. Their work in this vein is the subject of a groundbreaking traveling exhibition entitled Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930. The show, of which a major sponsor is the Sara Lee Corporation, is comprised of eighty-five works and is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until May 16. It will then travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where it may be seen from June 18 to September 9.

The young artists who founded the Nabis in 1888 advocated what they considered the highest form of expression or, in French, decoration, a term that had a far more profound meaning than the English decoration. The Nabis took their cue from a variety of sources, among them the English arts and crafts movement, the rococo revival in France, and the arts of Japan. With these aesthetic forerunners in mind, members of the group designed posters, theater sets, screens, stained glass, textiles, and ceramics, thereby bringing their art to a wider, less elite audience, which was at the time considered a particularly progressive idea.

In order to separate their creations from easel paintings, the artists utilized unconventional formats and referred to their works aspanneaux (or panels) as opposed to toiles (or canvases). Many of the artists, most particularly Vuillard, painted these in distemper and left them unlined and unvarnished, making them more fragile than oils on canvas.

While the four artists who are the subject of this exhibition maintained lifelong friendships, their careers evolved in different directions, particularly after 1900. Bonnard was noted for his domestic scenes; Denis for murals commissioned to decorate both domestic and ecclesiastical interiors; Roussel for his small-scale panels and pastels; and Vuillard for his singular combinations of portraits in decorative interiors, generally executed in large format. In retrospect, however, these artists' use of large formats, highly patterned and colorful compositions, and two-dimensional picture planes laid the foundations for modem masters like Henri Matisse and, later, color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. The catalogue, by the Chicago curator Gloria Groom, with an essay by Nicholas Watkins and contributions. by Jennifer Paoletti and Therese Barruel, is published by the Art Institute and is distributed by Yale University Press.