Musée D'Orsay, until 21
january 2007.
In
December 1892, Maurice Denis written in André Gide: “I was very
occupied by lithographic work: I am at the beginning, with the whole
beginning of your illustration.” The young artist refers to the
compositions here that it considers for the Voyage of Urien, that it
will draw one year later. He has then in building site of engravings
for Sagesse, Verlaine, for a text of Edouard Dujardins and the
program of the Lady of the sea of Ibsen. Nothing is opposite in theory
than the paganism asserted by fringant follower of Wilde and this
artist whose catholic faith is already well anchored. And yet a major
friendship continues to bind them until the disappearance of Denis in
1943. This last will have always had a constant curiosity for the
others, other philosophies and beliefs and for the literature.
Cofounder of the group of the nabis in 1891 with his comrades of the
Academy Julian (Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Paul
Sérusier), it incarnates soon with glare the spirit of French
symbolism, while not rejecting anything the heritage of L, Gauguin and
even of Van Gogh. But it does not make a point of being expressed by a
language of an aggressive radicality.
Already at that time, it appears a mixture very curious about plastic
boldnesses counterbalanced by the very modern wisdom of the
compositions of Puvis de Chavannes, of which it is very admiring. It
combines the decorative spirit of the Art nouveau with an often
traditional iconography and very chocolate éclair like, for
example, Triple portrait of promised in marriage Marthe (1892) or
Virginal spring (1899). However, the Orchard of the wise virgins is a
kind of daydream erotic with mystical keys. Many angels pink, Christ
greens, the good sisters in the meadows like as many flowers, always
treated with a remarkable freedom.
Unfortunately, the religious bigotry of Maurice Denis will be right of
the astonishing paradox of its style and its culture. It ceases
launching out in the hazardous search of new aesthetic experiments and
directs little by little towards a neoclassicism enough conformist. The
History of Psyché, together decorative that it carries out for
the Russian collector Ivan Morosov in 1907, of a great freshness but is
already revealed a loss of the merry effervescence of its style. And
yet the blue Pond (1912), which is a work of a not very common audacity
in phase with the fauvism and even with the German expressionnism, once
more shows contradictions which live it then and which gave him wings
up to that point.
