Maurice Denis: Where the Symbolists and Les Nabis Meet

Maurice Denis - The Muses in the Sacred Wood, 1893, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay at Paris (click photo for larger image)French painter and writer Maurice Denis (1870-1943) was a member of both the Symbolist and Les Nabis movements. (Nabis means prophet and refers to new forms of expression in art.) His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art.

Denis was among the first artists to insist on the flatness of the picture plane, one of the great starting points for modernism, in the visual arts. In a famous proposal for the definition of painting, offered in 1890, he stated: "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."

In 1898, he produced a theory of creation that found the source for art in the character of the painter: "That which creates a work of art is the power and the will of the artist." Denis was an important precursor of abstract art, although he was far more interested in finding the divine in the everyday. Many of his later works are devotional images.