I used to think the Nabis were just footnote painters—you know, the ones who came after the Impressionists but before anyone really cared about modern art.
When Pierre Bonnard Started Painting Walls Like They Were Alive
Turns out, the Nabis—French for “prophets,” which is definately a choice—weren’t just making pretty pictures. They were fundamentally rewiring how Post-Impressionists thought about space, color, and the whole idea of what a painting could do. Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Sérusier: these guys took Gauguin’s decorative impulses and pushed them so far that suddenly a domestic interior wasn’t just a scene, it was a pattern, a rhythm, a kind of visual music. They flattened perspective not because they couldn’t draw—though critics at the time suggested that, half-joking—but because they wanted the eye to move differently across the canvas. Wait—maybe that’s obvious now, but in the 1890s it was radical. They were treating paintings like textiles, like Japanese prints, like anything except windows into reality.
The Curious Case of Decorative Flatness and Emotional Depth
Here’s the thing: the Nabis made flatness feel intimate. Vuillard’s wallpapered rooms, where figures blend into floral patterns until you almost lose them—that’s not just technique, that’s a philosophy. It’s about how we actually see domestic space, how memory works, how a room feels rather than how it measures. I’ve spent hours staring at “The Suitor” and I still can’t tell where the woman ends and the wallpaper begins, which I guess is the point.
How Japanese Woodblocks Became a French Obsession and Changed Everything
The Nabis were obsessed with ukiyo-e prints—Hokusai, Hiroshige, the whole tradition of bold outlines and anti-naturalistic color. But they didn’t just copy; they synthesized. They took that flatness, that decorative boldness, and married it to Symbolist ideas about emotion and meaning. So you’d get a painting like Sérusier’s “The Talisman,” which is barely recognizable as a landscape—it’s more like color fields having a conversation. This wasn’t abstraction yet, but it was close, and Post-Impressionists like Matisse and the Fauves were watching, taking notes, wondering how far they could push it. Honestly, without the Nabis’ willingness to treat color as autonomous, as something that didn’t need to justify itself through realism, we probably don’t get Fauvism in 1905. The influence is that direct.
Why Intimacy and Monumentality Could Suddenly Coexist on the Same Canvas
What strikes me now is how the Nabis made small moments monumental. A woman reading. A table set for tea. These weren’t grand historical scenes, but the way they’re composed—flattened, patterned, color-saturated—gives them weight. They feel important not because of subject matter but because of formal intensity. Post-Impressionists picked up on this: the idea that visual design itself could carry meaning, that you didn’t need narrative drama if you had compositional drama. Bonnard’s nudes, for instance, aren’t erotic so much as they’re chromatic events—the pink of skin against the yellow of a bedspread becomes the whole story. I guess it makes sense that this approach would resonate with artists trying to move past Impressionism’s flickering light and into something more structural, more deliberate. The Nabis proved you could be decorative and serious at the same time, which maybe sounds easy now but was borderline heretical then. Anyway, their legacy isn’t always loud, but it’s everywhere—flattened space, expressive color, the domestic as profound. You see it in Matisse’s interiors, in Vuillard’s later work, in how we still recieve visual information today when a designer chooses pattern over depth.
