- Maurice Denis: Le Spirituel Dans l'ArtOur PickBy Jean-Paul Bouillon / 2006
- Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical AnthologyOur PickBy Henri Dorra
- Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise (1870-1943)Our PickBy Jean-Paul Bouillon, Sylvie Patry and others
- Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930By Gloria Groom, Nicholas Watkins and others
- The NabisOur PickBy Albert Kostenevitch
Important Art by Maurice Denis
Le Mystère Catholique (1889)
Painted when Denis was just 18 years old, this work depicts a Catholic ceremony celebrating one of the Christian mysteries, the appearance of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. It shows two children carrying large candles, a woman clothed in white whose head is framed by a golden aureole, and a priest holding a copy of the Bible. Denis explored this subject across six different works, this painting, from 1889, being the second and most famous of them. In composing this piece, Denis arrived at a new synthetic language for his art, the precursor of the visual vocabulary which he would continue to refine across the remainder of his life.
The painting offers a deeply personal vision of the Annunciation, which is reenvisaged in a conspicuously modern context, the altar boys and priest symbolizing the angels, the lissom lady in white as the Virgin Mary, her hand resting suggestively on her stomach. The painting's dreamlike colors, and the otherworldly delicacy and grace of the figures, emphasizes the spiritual content of the scene. These qualities partly take a cue from the new collective approach of the Nabis. At the same time, we can sense in the painting's color-palette the influence of the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, one of Denis's artistic masters, who had composed a famous Annunciation scene for the convent of San Marco in Florence. In Fra Angelico's work, Denis noted, "lighting is diffused", "daylight is white", and "shadows are non-existent" - we can see similar tonal affects at work in his own painting.
Le Mystere Catholique is, amongst other things, a significant early example of the work associated with the Nabis, who abandoned the Post-Impressionist concern with naturalistic recreation of visual sensation - a concern most strikingly borne out in the Pointillism of Suerat - in favor of vibrant colors and figurative abstraction which would capture the sensual and emotional content of the subject-matter. At the same time, the painting shows the deep religious belief which informed Denis's art from the earliest phase of his career - his sense that art should "celebrate all the miracles of Christianity" - which would later place him at odds with many of the most significant developments in modern art.
Sunlight on the Terrace (1890)
At first glance, this painting seems to consist of various amorphous patches of color - red, blue, black - faintly outlined in white, and devoid of obvious figurative content or implied three-dimensional form. However, the title guides the viewer to interpret the work as showing a sunlit terrace: more specifically, the painting depicts the seventeenth-century terrace of the Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Denis was living at the time of composition. The light of the sun appears as a monochrome patch of bright red on orange ground, the tree leaves as a single, dark green shape, the sky as an enclosed patch of blue. Blobs of red, blending in with the red of the sunlight, reprsent a group of figures in the background; one form, perhaps female, stands out in orange in the foreground.
This work is an early product of Denis's Nabi period. As such, it seems to put into practice a statement from his famous "Definition of Neo-Traditionalism", published the same year: that a painting is, before anything else, "a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order". Like all the Nabi painters, Denis was a fervent admirer of Gauguin, and this piece's emphasis on pure color is a clear nod to the master, though this influence is combined with a number of others. The choice of colors, for example, and the organic shapes, also generate a curious, proto-Expressionist intensity reminiscent of the work of Symbolist painters such as Odilon Redon. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints is clear from the extreme flatness of the composition, and in the use of a small number of clearly distinguished shapes.
Sunlight on the Terrace was never exhibited, as Denis considered it the document of an experiment rather than a finished work. In retrospect, however, it seems to predict the movement towards a purer, more extreme form of abstraction which would characterize a whole range of post-Nabi art in France, perhaps especially the Fauvist paintings of Matisse and others. As regards Denis's own artistic development, this painting seems to point to a possible movement towards extreme abstraction which Denis would not, in fact, follow through on.
The Two Sisters (1891)
The two sisters shown in this painting are depicted in an abstract, stylized manner, their facial expressions greatly simplified, their hair pulled up in buns, their fingers elongated; surrounding them is a decorative, floral border which, in true modernist style, is integrated into the main body of the painting itself.
The appearance and body language of the women alludes to the movement of Japonism -engagement with the art and design traditions of Japan - which had influenced a whole swath of European art across the second half of the nineteenth century, and was reaching the peak of its cultural currency by the time this painting was composed. Denis's Japonism indicates one of the key stylistic influences on his early-1890s work, and on the work of the Nabis in general. Even prior to the foundation of that group in 1888, however Denis was already a committed Japonist, having studied a catalogue of Japanese art published by the influential art dealer Siegfried Bing, and set about attempting to combine the Symbolist style of Pierre Puvis de Chavanne with a vibrancy of color influenced by Japanese style. Denis had also integrated the motif of the oriental fan - introduced into French painting by the Impressionist Edgard Degas, who had used fans as paintings surfaces since the 1870s - into his work as early as 1884.
In this sense, The Two Sisters indicates a general stylistic trend within French painting of the 1880s-90s. But the outward influence of Japonism should not obscure the deeper formal and emotional concerns of this painting. The shapes, colors, and facial expressions depicted, that is, indicate Denis's underlying concern with capturing the invisible world of moral ideas and spiritual sensations in the outward appearance of his subjects. The flatness of the picture plane, the use of simplified shapes and uniform patches of color, the delicacy of the figures' apparent movements and expressions are also intended to convey the archetypal language of the inner self which Denis was concerned with capturing. This was a concern he shared with the Nabis as a group, but which was made more pronounced by his intense religious faith.
Influences and Connections

- Paul Sérusier
- Pierre Bonnard
- André Gide
- Jacques-Emile Blanche
- Paul Sérusier
- Pierre Bonnard
- Édouard Vuillard
- Paul Ranson
- Ker-Xavier Roussel
- Les Nabis
- Fauvism
- Cubism
- Neoclassicism
- Synthetism