Six distinctive group portraits are now the works for which he is best known. But aren’t they strange, set in comparison with contemporary paintings?
Vallotton
High-chroma, constructive strokes, realism typical of the mid-20th century, and ‘corn style’ using coalescent tiles of high-chroma paint – you couldn’t get further from being Nabi.
Modern bridges and more modern paintings from Vallotton, Bonnard, Schiele, and most prominently Joseph Stella’s ‘Brooklyn Bridge’.
Paintings from 1893-95 feature predominantly women, and explore the theme of womanhood. Bonnard, Vuillard, SĂ©rusier and others.
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.
Many of his last paintings were landscapes, made from earlier sketchbooks and studies, seen through the eye of the print-maker.
From 1907, he painted a series of mythological works, and increasingly turned to landscapes, some of which are most unusual, almost surreal.
His enigmatic paintings of interiors appear cinematic in their composition and lighting, akin to those of cinematographers of the future, not painters of the past.
Originally a portraitist in academic style, he was a Nabi in the early 1890s before developing his own simple but strange figurative paintings.
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