Maurice Denis

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) wrote the manifesto that helped launch modern art. Born in Granville, Normandy, to a railroad worker's family, he grew up in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris. By thirteen, he was sketching Old Masters at the Louvre. In 1888, at the Académie Julian, a fellow student named Paul Sérusier returned from Brittany with a small landscape painted under Gauguin's guidance. Denis and his friends were so amazed by this "Talisman" that they formed a group: Les Nabis, Hebrew for "prophets."

The group included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, but Denis became their theorist. In 1890, still only twenty, he wrote the definition that artists would quote for a century: "Remember that a picture, before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order." This insistence on the picture plane's flatness became a foundation for Cubism, Fauvism, and abstract art. Denis himself never went abstract. His style drew on Gauguin's bold shapes, Japanese flatness, and medieval stained glass, creating decorative works with Symbolist and religious themes.

He traveled to Italy in 1895 and fell under the spell of Fra Angelico and early Renaissance fresco painters. His later career turned increasingly to sacred art. After World War I, he founded the Ateliers d'Art Sacré (Workshops of Sacred Art) and decorated numerous churches. He was a founder of the Salon d'Automne. Denis died in Paris in 1943, struck by a truck. His former home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye is now a museum dedicated to the Nabis. Major works are at the Musée d'Orsay.