The Art of French Decorative Painting.

• Author: GROOM, GLORIA

"AT THE BEGINNING of the nineties, a war cry rang from one studio to another: `Away with easel pictures! away with that unnecessary piece of furniture!' Painting was to come into the service of all the arts, and not be an end in itself. `The work of the painter begins where that of the architect is finished. Hence let us have walls, that we may paint them over.... There are no paintings, but only decorations.'"

This statement, made by Dutch painter Jan Verkade, rousingly summed up the idealistic aims of a group of young French artists in the 1890s, who banded together under the banner of the "Nabis" ("prophets"). As seen in the Nabis' baffle cry, they rejected painting as an illusionistic window onto nature--a concept primarily associated with easel painting--in favor of an art of decoration. The result was a new kind of painting wherein the message was conveyed through formal means. It was also a way of expanding the boundaries of painting from the framed object to be exhibited and sold to an artwork intimately linked to the interior for which it was intended.

Professional colleagues and lifelong friends, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel were members of the Nabis for a decade. They were not effetes or bohemians, but progeny of middle- to upper-class parents. Roussel was the son of a wealthy homeopathic doctor; Vuillard was the coddled youngest child in a household run by his widowed and financially independent mother; and Bonnard was the son of a senior administrator in the War Ministry. Only Denis, the son of a railroad administrator, could properly be called working class. The four met while taking art classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the alternative studio of the Academie Julian.

As Nabis, they looked to the hero of the avant-garde at that time, Paul Gauguin. From him, they learned that a painting should not be a window onto nature that is descriptive, but a window onto the soul expressed through symbols. Above all, they assimilated Gauguin's basic that all art is decorative, and that the artist's goals should not be limited by particular styles, scales, or media. In 1890, Denis published what became in essence the cornerstone of modernism: "It is well to remember that a picture, before being a war-horse, nude, or some other subject, is essentially a flat surface covered with lines and colors arranged in a particular fashion."

All four of the artists sought to break with academic...