In 1890 several art students at the Académie Julian in Paris—notably Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard—joined forces to form a vanguard group called the Nabis. As suggested by their name (Hebrew for "prophet"), they rejected Impressionism’s reliance on sensory data, opting instead for stylized forms imbued with mystery. The Nabis delighted in pure line and unmodulated color, and they greatly admired Japanese woodblock prints and the art of Paul Gauguin.
That same year, Denis famously defined painting as "essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order," a statement often said to characterize the formalist tendencies of the entire group. Denis himself, however, was an ardent Catholic for whom the process of decorative abstraction was redolent of spiritual purification. Believing art to be "the sanctification of nature," he sought to emulate the fifteenth-century Italian master Fra Angelico, using the vocabulary of avant-garde painting to devise modern "icons."
Denis set Easter Mystery, a gentle fantasia on the Resurrection as narrated in the Gospel of Saint Mark, in the rolling landscape near his home in St.-Germain-en-Laye, just west of Paris. In the foreground, the two Maries and Salome encounter the angel of the Good News at the tomb of the risen Christ. A disembodied hand of God bearing the Eucharist emerges from a screen of trees, beyond which mysterious, white-robed figures advance across a lawn in a procession evocative of a First Communion ceremony. All of nature seems to hum with imminent rebirth.
Easter Mystery reveals the impact on Denis of Georges Seurat’s Neo-Impressionist "dot" technique, as well as the influence of Gauguin and the so-called Italian primitives. But its eclectic iconography, delicate color harmonies, and sinuous arabesques give it a sweet visual poetry that is Denis’s alone.
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