Short summary of their history, art, and their role in the evolution of painting in the twentieth century, with copious links to articles here.
Gauguin
Flattened perspective, muted colours, and decorative patterning: some of the characteristics of the early Nabi years.
Paul Gauguin inspired and launched the Nabis during the late 1880s at Pont-Aven. They first exhibited in 1889, and published their manifesto in 1890, by which time he had moved onto another project.
After European artists saw Hokusai’s print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, their own depictions became widespread, peaking in 1896.
Friend, pupil and colleague of Paul Gauguin, he painted avidly in Brittany around 1890, then suddenly left and all but vanished, as have his paintings.
Influence by Gauguin and Sérusier, he painted intensively in Brittany as a Nabi. By 1894, he had entered a monastery, where he worked in the Beuron Art School.
4500 years of paintings of geese, from Rubens’ flock seen at harvest time, to Gauguin’s complement to his landlady. And some superb paintings of wild geese on the wing.
Three exceptional paintings are dominated by geometrical forms. In one, a huge golden cylinder hangs in the night sky. Was this an innovative abstract painting?
One of the paintings he made in 1888 is quite unlike any other that he made in his career: The Talisman, which became an icon for the Nabis. Is it abstract?
Buried in the introduction to day 4, this became La Fontaine’s fable of Brother Philippe’s Geese, was painted by Boucher and others, entered French idiom, and was alluded to by a vanished painting by Gauguin.
