Maurice Denis (1870-1943) | Symbolist, Spiritualist, Neoclassicist

Описание: Maurice Denis was a French painter associated with the Nabis, painting in a symbolist and later neo-classical style.

Denis was born in 1870 in Granville, Normandy, in the north of France, where his parents had moved to escape the Franco-Prussian war. After the war they returned to Paris and Denis grew up there.

In 1888 he left school and enrolled in the Académie Julian art school. There, he met Paul Sérusier and Pierre Bonnard. With them, two of his old friends from school, Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel, and a few others, he founded Les Nabis.

Les Nabis (see more here -    • Who were Les Nabis? | Art Movement 1889 - ...  ) were a semi-secretive group, part art movement, part boys club. Denis was the theorist of the group, famously penning the aphorism with which the Nabis started each of their meetings. “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order”.

During his time with the Nabis, Denis’ work was inspired by the synthetism of Gauguin and the symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He later became more involved in decorative pieces, as with some of the other Nabis. In the late 1890s, Denis made a number of trips to Italy which would lead to changes in his style. Inspired by the Italian Renaissance masters, Denis developed a style that would come to be known as Neo-Classicism.

Denis was deeply religious from his teenage years and maintained this faith throughout his life. This formed a central tenet of his painting both in subject and approach. Through his career he produced numerous works for religious settings. In 1919 he founded the Ateliers d’Art Sacré, these workshops created murals and paintings for churches, particularly those devastated by the recent war.

In 1943 Denis was hit by a car and died of the injuries. He was 72.

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