Les Nabis (1888–1900): The Secret Brotherhood that Made Flat Color Modern
In 1888, a young painter returned to Paris with a tiny panel made “under Gauguin’s direction.” His friends treated it like a portable manifesto. From that seed—Paul Sérusier’s The Talisman—grew Les Nabis, a close circle who turned flat color, bounding line, and pattern into a new way of building pictures. Their paintings, posters, and decorative panels bridged Post‑Impressionism and Symbolism—and set the stage for modern graphic design.
What was the Nabis movement?
Les Nabis were a Paris‑based brotherhood active roughly from 1888 to 1900. Rather than treating a painting as a window into deep space, they embraced it as a designed surface—flat planes of color bounded by emphatic line, enlivened with pattern and the rhythms of everyday life. Their art fused spiritual overtones from fin‑de‑siècle Symbolism with lessons from Paul Gauguin’s Synthetism and the bold, simplified shapes of Cloisonnism.
In practice, that meant decorative wall panels as often as easel pictures; printed posters and magazine pages alongside canvases. You’ll see the signature look in the work of Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard—with colleagues Félix Vallotton, Paul Ranson, and Ker‑Xavier Roussel adding their own voices.
Origin story: a tiny board called The Talisman
In October 1888 at Pont‑Aven, Sérusier painted a small panel “under the direction of Gauguin.” Back at the Académie Julian, he showed the portable landscape to friends, who nicknamed it The Talisman. The point was less the motif than the method: simplify the motif, lock shapes with line, and let color carry structure. A circle of friends—soon calling themselves Nabis (“prophets”)—adopted the lesson: pictures don’t have to imitate optical depth to hold meaning.
The “prophets”: belief, surface, and symbolism
The name Nabis (from Hebrew/Arabic for “prophets”) reflected a taste for ceremony and an earnest belief that art could reveal invisible truths. Maurice Denis gave the movement its famous touchstone when he argued that a picture is—before any subject—“a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” In his hands, religious scenes unfold on patterned planes; in Vuillard’s interiors, wallpapers and textiles press forward like actors.
That combination—designed surface plus suggestive subject—is why Nabi works feel both intimate and quietly radical.
How to spot a Nabi (your quick checklist)
- Flat color planes: forms built from unmodeled zones of hue, rather than shaded “volumes.”
- Bounding line: contours that lock shape against shape—think stained glass or enamel.
- Pattern everywhere: wallpapers, textiles, tiles, foliage; pattern is structure, not backdrop.
- Shallow space: rooms read like screens or tapestries; landscapes like decorative fields.
- Everyday subjects: interiors, gardens, café life; the “private stage” of fin‑de‑siècle Paris.
- Print sensibility: silhouettes, cropped frames, and lettering that feel ready for a poster.
Four key voices
Paul Sérusier
Catalyst and teacher. With The Talisman as a touchstone, he modeled a way to reduce and re‑compose nature into legible bands, patches, and contours. His Pont‑Aven experience under Gauguin’s eye linked the group to Synthetism’s credo of simplification and invention.
Maurice Denis
Theorist of surface. Denis’s panels and cycles treat painting as designed architecture for rooms—sacred or domestic. His famous “flat surface” line distilled the movement’s intuition: composition and color come first; subject unfolds within their order.
Pierre Bonnard
The “intimist” with a public voice. Bonnard’s warmth animates interiors and gardens, but he also took Nabi sensibility into the street with lithographic posters—most famously for La Revue blanche—bridging art and mass communication.
Édouard Vuillard
Master of pattern. Vuillard’s rooms are theaters of fabric, paper, and light. In them, figures merge with wallpapers and screens; motif becomes rhythm. His commissions show how Nabi art thrived when it became part of the room itself.
Prints, posters, and journals: Paris in the 1890s
The Nabis didn’t stop at canvas. Color lithography was booming in the 1890s; artists designed pages and posters for avant‑garde journals and the city’s poster‑plastered streets. Bonnard’s designs for La Revue blanche are a case study: chic silhouettes, witty cropping, and letters that feel like drawing.
The leap matters: it shows how Nabi surface logic slipped naturally into graphic media—one reason their DNA is traceable in modern design.
Decorative painting: panels for everyday life
Many Nabi works were conceived as decor: suites of panels for dining rooms and salons, screens and friezes, even wallpaper designs. Rather than a single framed view, the art wraps a space—quietly coordinating color, subject, and mood with the rituals of daily life.
This is the heart of their modernity: art that’s not just about a scene but about the setting—a designed experience.
Timeline at a glance (1888–1900)
- 1888: Sérusier paints The Talisman at Pont‑Aven; Académie Julian circle coalesces.
- 1889–1890: Denis formulates principles; Japanese prints and Synthetism shape the group’s look.
- 1891–1894: Decorative cycles for private interiors; posters and journal design gather steam.
- 1894: Bonnard’s poster for La Revue blanche becomes a touchstone of the decade.
- 1895–1896: Vuillard’s panel suites bring wallpaper logic center stage.
- 1897–1899: Commissions and exhibitions consolidate the Nabi profile.
- 1900: Final exhibitions; members diverge, but the surface‑first logic keeps echoing.
Legacy: from Nabis to design modernism
If the Nabis argued for picture‑as‑surface, the next three decades showed what that unlocked. In design, vector‑like line and modular color spilled into the posters and objects we now call Art Nouveau. Vienna filtered those ideas through a stricter geometry—the Vienna Secession—setting up a century of total design.
In typography, the appetite for clarity and shape became a method at the Bauhaus—see our Bauhaus typography examples—and later the grid discipline of the Swiss Style. In painting, the Nabi sense that color can build form fed directly into the high‑key planes of Fauvism.
Where to see Nabis works
Start in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay and the Petit Palais; look for Sérusier’s Talisman, panels by Denis, and posters by Bonnard. In the U.S., check the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) for poster culture of the 1890s and museum collections with Vuillard interiors and Bonnard graphics. Once you know the “surface logic,” you’ll spot Nabi DNA across galleries devoted to 1900–1930 modernism.
FAQs
- What does “Nabis” mean?
- “Nabis” comes from a word for “prophets.” The group adopted the name to signal a shared mission: to renew painting by treating the picture as a designed surface with symbolic power.
- What’s the difference between Synthetism and Cloisonnism?
- Synthetism (from Gauguin) emphasizes simplification and invention—reducing forms to essential shapes and colors. Cloisonnism highlights strong contours that lock flat color zones together, like stained glass.
- Why is Paul Sérusier’s Talisman so important?
- Because it became a teaching tool among friends: a proof that a small panel of simplified, invented color could organize a picture more powerfully than traditional shading or perspective.
- How did Les Nabis influence posters?
- By treating drawing and lettering as a single design. Bonnard’s posters for La Revue blanche show how silhouettes, cropping, and bold flat color translate seamlessly into lithography.
- What did Maurice Denis mean by “a painting is a flat surface…”?
- Denis’s line reminds us that color and composition come first; subject comes through those choices. It’s a compact explanation for why Nabi works read like designed surfaces, not deep windows.
- Which artists should I learn first?
- Start with Sérusier (origin), Denis (theory and panels), Bonnard (intimist + posters), and Vuillard (patterned interiors). Their differences reveal the movement’s range.