The Nabis And Their Period

"The great virtue of Koch's work is his attempt to describe the world-view presupposed by the prophets as they evaluated their societies and formulated their messages. In this respect his treatment is a valuable contribution to our understanding."--Thomas W. OverholtCatholic Biblical Quarterly

Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.

Pierre Bonnard was the leader of a group of post-impressionist painters who called themselves the Nabis, from the Hebrew word meaning ‘prophet’. Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel and Denis, the most distinguished of the Nabis, revolutionized the spirit of decorative techniques during one of the richest periods in the history of French painting. Influenced by Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavanne, by popular imagery and Japanese etchings, this post-impressionist group was above all a close circle of friends who shared the same cultural background and interests. An increasing individualism in their art often threatened the group’s unity and although tied together by a common philosophy their work clearly diverged. This publication lets us compare and put into perspective the artists within this fascinating group. The works presented in this collection offer a palette of extraordinary poetic expressions: candid in Bonnard, ornamental and mysterious in Vuillard, gently dream-like in Denis, grim and almost bitter in Vallotton, the author shares with us the lives of these artists to the very source of their creative gifts.

Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.

Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) played a seminal role in Post-Impressionist France. In his writings and work, he favored emotional responses to nature over intellectual uses of lines, color, and composition. In 1888 he and Emile Bernard developed a new style called Synthetism. Three groups of Gauguin's symbolist followers—Pont Aven, Les Nabis, and Rose + Croix pursued and extended the Synthetist vision. This sourcebook focuses on the most prominent adherents of the three schools directly affected by Gauguin's symbolism. This is the first comprehensive, single-volume guide and bibliography of artists in these three important French avant-garde movements. This work covers the entire careers of 16 artists by providing biographical sketches, chronologies, citations to primary and secondary literature and exhibitions.