Les Nabis

Les Nabis were a group of French painters active in the 1890s who used expressive color, simplified forms, and decorative pattern to move beyond naturalistic representation.

Paul Sérusier: French painter whose 1888 landscape study became a touchstone for the Nabis’ experiments with color and form. His painting from Pont-Aven helped inspire the group’s early style.
Cloisonnism: A style that uses flat areas of color separated by strong outlines, inspired partly by cloisonné enamel. Its bounded color shapes helped Nabis simplify forms and heighten decoration.
Pont-Aven School: A loose circle of artists who worked in the Breton town of Pont-Aven, including Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. Contact with this circle shaped the style that Sérusier brought back to Paris.
Nabis murals: Decorative wall paintings by Nabi artists, often designed for private interiors and integrated with their architecture. Murals put the group’s rejection of isolated easel painting into practice.
Academic art: Art produced within the formal systems of European academies, which emphasized established subjects, techniques, and hierarchies. Nabi simplification and decorative design challenged academic standards of finish and subject.
Maurice Denis: French painter and critic associated with the Nabis, known for defining painting as an arrangement of colors on a flat surface. His writings gave the group’s formal experiments a concise theoretical statement.
Synthetism: A late nineteenth-century approach that simplified forms and synthesized observed appearance, memory, and emotion. Its principles helped explain the Nabis’ move away from literal naturalism.
Paul Gauguin: French painter whose bold color and simplified forms influenced Symbolism and the development of modern art. His advice to Sérusier became a formative influence on the Nabis.
Nabis book illustration: Illustrated books and prints made by Nabi artists using simplified forms and integrated text-image design. Print work let Nabi aesthetics circulate beyond gallery paintings.
Naturalism: An artistic approach that depicts subjects with close attention to observable appearance and everyday life. The Nabis treated color and form as expressive choices rather than faithful records.

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