Nabis Art | History and Sitemap

Ambitious decorative painting enjoyed a resurgence in Europe from the late 1880s through the early twentieth century.

In Paris, Pierre Bonnard🎨, Maurice Denis🎨 and Édouard Vuillard🎨 were among the most influential artists to embrace decoration as painting’s primary function.

Their works celebrate pattern and ornament, challenge the boundaries that divide fine arts from crafts, and, in many cases, complement the interiors for which they were commissioned.

Disaffected with the rigidly representational painting methods taught at the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Denis joined with other like-minded students in the fall of 1888 to form a brotherhood called the “Nabis”, a Hebrew word meaning “prophets”.

The group was spearheaded by Paul Sérusier🎨, who had visited Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven over the summer and was now spreading an aesthetic message based on his interpretation of Gauguin🎨’s Symbolism.

Paul Sérusier - The Bois d'Amour à Pont-Aven / The Talisman (Le Talisman), 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Macchiaioli | Art History and Sitemap

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade and color.

This practice relates the Macchiaioli to the French Impressionists who came to prominence a few years later, although the Macchiaioli pursued somewhat different purposes.

Antonio Ermolao Paoletti

Art Nouveau | History and Sitemap

From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed the development of Art Nouveau (“New Art”).

Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration.

Sinuous lines and “whiplash” curves were derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms such as those by German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919) in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899).

Other publications, including Floriated Ornament (1849) by Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) and The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by British architect and theorist Owen Jones (1809-1874), advocated nature as the primary source of inspiration for a generation of artists seeking to break away from past styles.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | In the Studio, 1877

Pierre-Auguste Renoir often used his friends as models for genre scenes, most of which were posed and painted in the studio.

The sitters for this small painting were the amateur critic Georges Rivière and the artist's model Marguerite Legrand, known professionally as Margot.

• Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).
• Title: In the Studio (Georges Riviere and Marguerite Legrand).
• Date: Between 1876 and 1877.
• Medium: Oil on canvas.
• Dimensions: 35 x 25 cm.
• Collection: Dallas Museum of Art.

Paul Laurenzi, 1964 | Figurative painter

Paul Laurenzi was born in Antibes, France.

It was after various small interventions in the world of advertising and children's book that Paul Laurenzi, joined an association of painting based in the South of France.

This allows him to participate in various local exhibitions and sympathize with its president, professional artist.

The latter encourages him to present its works in a gallery from Marseille, which so agrees to expose his works of art.

His first "official" exhibition, beside Bernard Buffet's works takes place then, in 1987.