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Lord, help me find the truth. And, Lord, protect me from those who have already found it.
Most of them met at art school, the Académie Julian, gifted youngsters eager not only to learn from their masters but also to move beyond them. Influenced by ideas Sérusier had brought from Gauguin in Brittany, the young Vuillard, Denis, Bonnard, and others banded together. Wanting to leave the prevailing style of impressionism behind, they called themselves Nabis, prophets, and together with a few added colleagues set out to find a new approach to painting and color.
Denis became their theorist. In 1890, when only nineteen years old, he published his Définition du néo-traditionnisme. Its first paragraph famously set down the basic premise from which the other principles of the Nabis derived: “Remember that before it is a warhorse, a naked woman, or a trumpery anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (Russell 1971, 20). As is common with any diktat of theory, implications for possible rules of technique followed.
As time passed, the individuals among the Nabis painted and experimented, some staying close to the principles set down by Denis and some moving away. Troubled by a style felt to be insufficiently true to the theory, in 1898 Denis sent Vuillard a letter of concern about Vuillard's having wandered too far afield. In a long reply, a letter that seemed at once an effort at self-defense yet also a genuine striving toward self-definition, Vuillard wrote, “To sum up, I have a horror (or rather, an absolute terror) of general ideas that I have not arrived at by myself. It is not that I deny their validity. I'd rather own up