One of the most innovative and important French Post Impressionist groups. The key artists of the Nabis included Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis; Pierre Bonnard , Edouard Vuillard , Paul-Elie Ranson, Ker Xavier Roussel and Henri-Gabriel Ibels; Aristide Maillol , Felix Vallotton and Jan Verkade. The Nabis originated as a rebellious group of young student artists who banded together at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1888-89. They professed an alternative mode of painting and drawing to the sort of realist art which dominated exhibitions at the official Salon and the conventional teaching of its associated school (the Académie des Beaux-Arts). The Nabis also stood against the naturalism of the art of the French Impressionists. The Nabis took their name from the Hebrew for prophet (Nabiim), inspired by the prophetic nature they felt of their artistic calling – the missionary zeal with which they felt it their duty to promote their cause for a revolution of artistic values and techniques. The Nabis were inspired particularly by the art of Paul Gauguin. Paul Sérusier, who assumed leadership of the group, had spent the summer of 1888 in Brittany with Gauguin and returned to the Académie Julian armed with his Landscape in the Bois d’Amour, created at Pont-Avon directly under Gauguin’s supervision. This became known as the group’s ‘Talisman’ and seemed to present the young students with a radical new mode of painting and artistic philosophy. The Nabis were also very much inspired by ‘art japonais’, particularly admiring its formalised subjects and its decorative and hieratic qualities and perceiving in it models of simplified and flat spatial composition. ‘Art japonais’ was highly fashionable in artistic circles in Paris from the 1880s, facilitated by the opening up of trading relations between Japan and Europe in the mid 1850s. For example in 1883 an exhibition of some 3000 examples of Japanese art, particularly prints and engravings, was mounted at the Galerie Georges Petit. It was Maurice Denis who provided the chief theoretical articulation of the Nabis’ ideals and famously formulated a radical formalist re-definition of painting in 1890 in his article Définition du Néo-Traditionnisme which appeared that year in Art et Critque: "Remember that a painting before it is a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is first and foremost a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order." Nabis art had strong associations with Symbolist thought and culture whereby the representation of reality was imbued with metaphysical significance. The Nabis had a profound belief in the significance of the ordinary and everyday: both in this Symbolist sense and in the anti-elitist sense that art should be more widely available and efficacious. In pursuit of this goal, the Nabis artists are notable for the radical variety of media in which they worked: including in addition to the fine arts, printmaking, poster design, book illustration, textiles, furniture and theatre design. The Nabis flourished in the 1890s and exhibited together between 1892 and 1899 – the last exhibition being an important mixed exhibition at Durand Ruel where they exhibited alongside the Neo-Impressionists and several independent artists, most notably Odilon Redon .– before the artists naturally parted company at the turn of the century. The artistic achievements and lessons of these years however had a profound longevity.

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