Going Public

"Passerby"
Oil on Cardboard, 7 7/8 x 11
Félix Vallatton, 1897

Whenever I visit a special exhibit at a museum, I always catch my breath to see a previously unexhibited painting that is on loan from a private collection. Such a rare treat! I marvel at the luxury it must be for those private collectors to live every day with paintings by Manet, or Bonnard, or Vuillard--right there in their dining rooms. 

"Yellow Gable"
Oil on Cardboard, 11 7/8 x 10 5/8 in.
Maurice Denis, c. 1895

Occasionally, through the great generosity of a collector, an entire collection comes into the public realm (rather than being parceled off and auctioned to private purchasers). One such occasion is being heralded now, at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The Nabis collection of Roger Sant and his late wife Vickie Sant has been pledged as a future gift to The Phillips Collection, and the works are now being shown in a special exhibit that runs through January 26, 2020. The exhibit is entitled "Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life".

"Apprentices"
Oil on Cardboard, 12 x 9 in.
Édouard Vuillard, c. 1891-92

You don't have to have been reading this blog very long to know how much I love the Nabi painters, and especially Vuillard and Bonnard. The Nabis were a loosely organized group of avant-garde French painters working in the 1890's. They rebelled against the old-line, classical academies of art, as well as against the new-fangled Impressionists. 

"Street Scene"
Oil on Cardboard, 10 1/4 x 133/8 in.
Félix Vallotton, 1895

Although their styles were diverse, the Nabis were united by certain common factors. Their paintings tended to focus on scenes of domestic life, and they employed abstracted shapes of vibrant color. They often disregarded the rules of vanishing point perspective, so that their scenes were "flattened" into into an arrangement of color patterns. In fact, the words of one of the Nabis, Maurice Denis, became a sort of rallying cry for the group:

Remember that a painting--

before being a bottle horse, a nude woman,

or an anecdote of some sort--

is above all a flat surface

covered with colors

arranged in a certain order.

"Sleeping Woman"
Oil on Cardboard, 10 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.
Édouard Vuillard, 1892

The term "Nabi" is from the Hebrew word for prophet. Some say that these painters paved the way to what we know today as modern art. And yet their diversity and the quickly changing times led to an early disbandment. The Nabis held their final exhibit in 1900, and then went their separate ways, each going on to develop his own style and body of work. But the Phillips exhibit shows the group at its zenith.  I can't wait to see it.  If you can't make it to the exhibit, the book that accompanies the exhibit is excellent--well worth a look. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Sant family for this transformative gift.

PS: It seems that the Nabis are having "a moment"--another Nabi, Félix Vallotton (some of whose works are pictured above), is the subject of a major current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York....