Maurice Denis

Maurice Denis came from a simple family in Normandy and spent his entire life in Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris. As a schoolboy, he took drawing lessons and then educated himself autodidactically at the Louvre. He joined the movement of the “Nabis” (Hebrew for “prophets”) and published their theoretical manifesto in the journal Art et critique in 1890.

In 1893 Denis married Marthe Meurier (1871-1919), who became the main model for his paintings. His relationship with Brittany began with his honeymoon in Perros-Guirec, where he bought a villa in 1908. From 1895, he traveled several times to Italy to study the painting of the Italian masters.

After his debut in 1890, Denis’s career developed rapidly; he was a regular at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon of the Société national des Beaux-Arts. When the Nabis period ended in 1895, more ambitious works came to the fore, murals in churches and especially the painting of the dome in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1913. After the separation of church and state in 1905, he supported monarchist circles.

Denis wrote numerous articles outlining the principles of a possible “nouveau classicism”. In 1912, he published a collection of his articles under the title “Théories” with the subtitle “Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouveau ordre Classique” (“From Symbolism and Gauguin to a new Classical order”). He also taught his doctrines at the Académie Ranson until 1919. Purchases and commissions in France, Germany, and Russia ensured his development.

World War I and especially the death of his wife in 1919 led to an even more consistent turn to sacred art. In 1919 Denis founded the Ateliers d’art sacré together with George Desvallières. In addition to extensive professional decorations (e.g., in the building of the League of Nations in Geneva), the decoration of churches played a major role in his work. Denis also gained international recognition through major individual exhibitions, was appointed Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1926, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1932. During the Vichy regime, he was kept away from all official proceedings and died as a result of a car accident before the liberation.

For Denis, painting was always essentially religious and Christian art. His extensive painterly œuvre included more than 2,000 paintings, with simple shapes, soft curved lines, and pale colored surfaces, as well as about 30 profane and religious murals. In addition, he was regularly active in book illustration. Like the other Nabis, he designed early arts and crafts works, first fans, lampshades, wallpaper designs, furniture and stained-glass windows, and later vases. Defending the primacy of the object over formal considerations, he stood in contrast to the majority tendency of the avant-gardists.