Nabi Movement

Nabi Movement

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points

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Nabi Movement

• Nabi means “prophet.” This is the name of a group of French painters that broke into the history of painting near the end of the nineteenth century (just before the Fauves) with their use of vivid color to portray moods.
• Their greatest inspiration was Paul Gauguin (always Gauguin when it comes to color). And the most recognizable characteristic of a nabi painting is that the color is applied pure and smooth on large surfaces.
• The group was interested in exotic art, mainly oriental art (Japanese woodblock prints): flat forms, off-center compositions. We may see modernist influences in the use of decoration and the stylized feminine figure in some of its members.
• They often used cardboard and paper as support (materials that absorb more color; therefore, the colors become more nuanced, thus losing part of their aggressiveness).
• They called themselves “prophets” to indicate that they were ahead of their time, that they brought new concerns and opened new paths in the field of art, which they aimed to democratize so that access to it was not limited to a few as it had been so far.

Representative Artists: Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Sérusier, Ranson.

Image: Breton Women, Meeting in the Sacred Grove (1892). Paul Sérusier.

Recommended links:

Timeline: Artistic movements from Classical Antiquity to Rococo.

Timeline: Artistic movements from Neoclassicism till the end of the 19th century.

“Art is what you see, the emotion it causes you.”

Pont-Aven School.

Characteristic elements of Synthetism.

The First Painting of Synthetism?

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