Maurice DENIS - Original signed gouache drawing - Nabi movement
Crouching woman, (circa 1895)
Gouache on paper signed lower left, 27.5 x 19.5 cm (at sight).
Intimate scene, representing a woman on one knee on the ground. Charming drawing with large areas of warm colors specific to Nabism. Here everything is just volume without defined outline, only color creates the object.
This work in the purest Nabist style, of which he is the doctrinaire, perfectly illustrates the prophetic phrase considered today as one of the first definitions of modern art: “Remember that a painting, before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order assembled. ". As the painter's grandson, Paul Denis, rightly says, the finesse of the wrist is typical of the way in which the painter painted at that time, clearly illustrating here the kinship with Edouard Vuillard. Maurice In 1889, Maurice Denis convinced the latter to join a small dissident group from the Julian Academy, which produced works imbued with symbolism and spirituality, and which proclaimed itself the “brotherhood of the nabis”.
This work has the great interest of having never been presented on the market, remaining in the descendants of the painter Maurice Denis until this day.
Provenance: descendant of the painter Maurice Denis, who remained in the family to this day
Certificate of authenticity from Paul Denis, grandson of the painter, dated June 13, 2024
Dimensions :
- Height : 27,5 cm
- Width : 19,5 cm
Maurice Denis :
(1870-1943) was a French painter and writer, and a member of the Symbolist and Les Nabis movements. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art. He was born in 1870, in Granville, a coastal town in the Normandy region of France. Waters and coastlines would remain favorite subject matter throughout his career, as would material drawn from the Bible. For such an avant-garde figure, Denis had a surprisingly broad religious streak. Maurice attended both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. At the Académie, he met painters and future Nabi members including Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard; through Bonnard he also met the future Nabis Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Hermann-Paul. In 1890, they formed The Nabis. They chose "Nabi"—Hebrew for "Prophet"— because they understood they would be creating new forms of expression. The group would split apart by the end of the decade, and would influence the later work of both Bonnard and Vuillard, as well as non-Nabi painters like Henri Matisse.
After Les Nabis, Denis went on to focus on religious subjects and murals. In 1922, he published his collected historical and theoretical work as "Nouvelles théories sur l’art moderne, sur l’art sacré"— that is, "New Theories of Modern and Sacred Art." The subjects of his mature works include landscapes and figure studies, particularly of mother and child. But his primary interest remained the painting of religious subjects. Denis was among the first artists to insist on the flatness of the picture plane — one of the great starting points for modernism, as practiced in the visual arts. In his famous proposal for the definition of painting, offered in 1890, he stated: "Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
Denis died in Paris of injuries resulting from an automobile accident in November 1943.
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