NABIS: 71, RUE DU FAUBOURG SAINT HONORÉ, PARIS 8E

The gallery HELENE BAILLY MARCILHAC is honored to present an exhibition devoted to the Nabis, the group of artists who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century around a shared conviction: to free painting from academicism and naturalist conventions.

Born out of the meeting at the Académie Julian between Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Ranson, the Nabis drew their initial inspiration from Paul Gauguin, whose work and ideas offered these young painters the possibility of a form of painting liberated from imitation. It was Sérusier who, in 1889, gave the movement its prophetic name: Nabis, from the Hebrew term Nevi’im, meaning “prophets.” This was not vanity, but the certainty that another kind of painting was possible, and that a renewed vision of art had become a necessity.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Nabis rejected all aesthetic orthodoxy. They deliberately presented themselves as “Impressionists and Symbolists” at their first collective exhibition in 1891 at the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery, asserting through that very phrase that they belonged to no exclusive school. Despite their individual differences and the diversity of their explorations, they remained united by a common ambition: to make painting a decorative and accessible art, combining learned creation with everyday life, and refusing the separation between fine arts and applied arts. Connected to La Revue blanche and close to the Salon des Indépendants, they circulated their ideas within Parisian intellectual circles, building a constant dialogue between painting, poetry, music, and design.

What deeply defines them is a formal conviction: painting must not narrate, but express. Maurice Denis stated this clearly when he affirmed that composition takes precedence over subject matter, and that a painting is прежде? Need fix. “a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” This Copernican revolution placed form, color, and rhythm at the heart of the work. The Nabis did not seek to paint the visible world; they explored its inner resonance, its atmosphere, its intimacy. Their compositions move between religious symbolism and domestic scenes, but always according to a logic in which pictorial arrangement becomes the true subject.

Art historians have shown that the Nabis fundamentally transformed what modern painting could be. By placing the autonomy of the surface and the expressive power of color at the center of their project, they opened up a field of exploration whose implications extended far beyond their collective moment. Their last group exhibition took place in 1900, yet their influence has never ceased to resonate. This legacy of painting rooted in everyday life, atmosphere, and interiority continues to challenge contemporary artists and to nourish debates on pictorial modernity, as was recently confirmed by the exhibition Être ici est une splendeur at the Musée d’Orsay, where Nabi thought enters into dialogue with contemporary creation.

At HELENE BAILLY MARCILHAC, we are particularly proud to present this group of essential works, which offers insight into the many facets of this singular adventure. The exhibition thus provides a rich and nuanced reading of the Nabis, from their Symbolist ambition to their radical formal invention, and reminds us how central their work remains to understanding the profound transformations of modern painting at the dawn of the twentieth century.