The Nabis were a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from Impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. The members included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Auguste Cazalis. Most were students at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s. The artists shared a common admiration for Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne and a determination to renew the art of painting, but varied greatly in their individual styles. They believed that a work of art was not a depiction of nature, but a synthesis of metaphors and symbols created by the artist. In 1900, the artists held their final exhibition and went their separate ways.
The first Nabis painting, by Paul Sérusier, Le Bois d'Amour à Pont-Aven or Le Talisman, 1888, oil on wood, 27 x 21.5 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Motif Romanesque by Maurice Denis (1890), one of the earliest Nabi paintings
Maurice Denis, Evening in September (1891)
The printed dress by Édouard Vuillard (1891), Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.
Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration "anywhere, out of the world".
Henri Fantin-Latour, By the Table, 1872, depicting: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d'Hervilly and Camille Pelletan (seated); Pierre Elzéar, Emile Blémont, and Jean Aicard (standing)
Portrait of Charles Baudelaire (c. 1862), whose writing was a precursor of the symbolist style
Eugen Bracht, The Shore of Oblivion, 1889
