More than ten years ago now, Gloria Groom’s exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Those who saw it or perused the meticulously documented catalogue can attest to the sustained and probing nature of Nabi artists’ engagement with ostensibly private, intimate modes of decorative painting. Groom made this especially clear with a stunning installation of four panels from Édouard Vuillard’s Album (1895). Vuillard’s canvases quietly vibrate with areas of pattern denoting things such as blouses, flowers, wallpaper, and linens in a restricted palette of deep reds, muted oranges, ochres, grey greens, and browns. The panels deny an easy apperception of three-dimensional space in favor of an overall atmospheric effect largely determined by the material qualities of paint on canvas. Vuillard’s paintings hung against Morris & Company wallpaper typical of that used by the artist’s patron, Misia Natanson, with labels mounted on stands in front of the walls, rather than on them. Presented in this way, Album activated the museum space, highlighting the essential link between the cycle and the domestic environment for which it was created. Among other things, Groom’s installation served to underline a vast difference between Vuillard’s decorative works and the kinds of paintings more readily associated with modernism.

The largest panel from Vuillard’s Album appears on the dust jacket of Katherine M. Kuenzli’s The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle, a book that builds upon Groom’s work in important ways. Kuenzli situates intimate, decorative forms of painting as central to fin-de-siècle modernism, thereby making a case for the inclusion of the Nabis into the modernist canon, and implicitly taking issue with T. J. Clark’s claim that “the decorative [in the 1890s] was a pretend solution to modernism’s problems.”¹ This act of recovery, however, comes at a price. Focusing almost exclusively on the work of Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, Kuenzli must largely leave behind many fellow travelers including Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Jan Verkade, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Félix Vallotton. In doing so, she chooses to sideline the still rather nagging question of whether Nabi group activity is more historical reality or art-historical construction.

Nevertheless, Kuenzli puts forth provocative arguments about the nature of this selectively defined Nabi aesthetic. She locates her triumvirate’s modernist credentials in a critical attitude toward the modern public sphere, seeking to show how their art challenged distinctions between public and private experience, the urban landscape and the domestic interior, masculinity and femininity. While some readers might question how truly distinct many of these oppositions were at the fin-de-siècle, Kuenzli works to demonstrate how, in undoing such binaries, “the Nabis engaged in domestic decoration as a means of overcoming the boundaries of the self” in an “aspiration towards universality and totality” (13). For Kuenzli, in other words, the all-encompassing, vibrating effect of works such as Album was designed to stimulate viewers to reverie, to a calming, even comforting sense of dissolution into a private space. She posits this experience as a radically new model offered up by the Nabis and their patrons for the relationship between art and life, countering the way in which much art-historical discourse on modernism has upheld artworks’ claims to autonomy.

This interpretation also runs counter to much English-language scholarship on the Nabis, which recently has drawn attention to the late nineteenth-century domestic interior as a space of drama, repressed desire, and psychological tension. Indeed, Kuenzli is explicit about trying to resolve what she views as a contradiction in the literature between readings of Nabi works as intimate evocations of and supplements to the bourgeois home, and those that underline these paintings’ more discomforting aspects. The writing of Nicholas Watkins, especially on Bonnard, represents the former interpretive strand, while the work of Guy Cogeval and Susan Sidlauskas on Vuillard, both very much indebted to Debora L. Silverman, represents the latter.²

Kuenzli’s arguments rely heavily on formalist interpretations of Nabi innovation, and her descriptions of particularly difficult to parse works, such as Vuillard’s panels for Dr. Vaquez (1896), are especially evocative; in and of themselves they make a persuasive case for form as central to Nabi concerns. She is explicit, moreover, in positioning Vuillard, Denis, and Bonnard as forerunners of twentieth-century abstraction. But Kuenzli makes recourse to a formalist modernism with a slight but crucial twist. Instead of a self-critical exploration of painting as medium, she argues, it was a critical attitude toward Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk that led to the Nabis’ formal purification of painting. This attitude, she argues, called for an intensive analysis of the individual arts prior to their synthesis into an aesthetic whole.

In the book’s first two chapters, Kuenzli contends that the Nabis’ push toward abstraction in paintings made for the private sphere was achieved in dialogue with public art forms, such as poster and theater design. Chapter 1 concentrates on Bonnard’s four-panel Women in the Garden (1891), initially intended as a folding screen. In this work, Kuenzli sees Bonnard as effectively “domesticating” the poster in the service of an intimate form of art making that would nevertheless be highly legible through its emulation of a mass form of communication. In chapter 2, Kuenzli looks at Vuillard’s Desmarais panels (1894) in conjunction with Nabi theater collaborations. While Patricia Eckert Boyer and Geneviève Aitken have provided important insights into Nabi engagement with symbolist theater, Kuenzli attempts to link their formal achievements more closely with the French reception of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.³ In this chapter, she is particularly keen to provide alternatives to readings of Nabi paintings as psychologized “re-enactments” (the word is Kuenzli’s) of symbolist dramas (88).

In part she argues, especially in chapter 2, for an increased attentiveness to the differences between large Nabi paintings intended for domestic interiors and much smaller works—both of which eschew the standard dimensions of easel painting, and thus declare their resistance to the art market. This is an important point that deserves further exploration. Nabi artists used a strikingly wide range of formats, supports, and techniques as they sought out different audiences for their works in various venues, which included not only the homes of their patrons, but also large public manifestations such as the Salon des Indépendants, smaller private galleries, and less traditional spaces such as theaters and the editorial offices of journals and newspapers. As Catherine Méneux pointed out at a November 2010 seminar on the Nabis held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, much work remains to be done in gathering together the critical reception of Nabi works as displayed in these differing venues, and, I would add, in analyzing the artists’ choices in relation to public, private, and more fluid spaces.

Chapters 3 and 4 return to the Gesamtkunstwerk, exploring the metaphor of musicality in relation to emerging forms of painterly abstraction. Kuenzli analyzes Denis’s Frauenliebe und Leben panels (1895), based on a song by Franz Schumann, as an attempt to fuse French symbolism—which Denis was coming to understand as excessively individualistic and subjective—with modern Catholicism. She goes on to investigate the Nabis’ collaboration with Henry van de Velde at Samuel Bing’s 1895 Art Nouveau exhibition, asserting that the Nabis’ adherence to painting as a particularly privileged medium was at odds with the less hierarchical Art Nouveau vision of the domestic interior.

In many ways, chapter 6 is the heart of the book. Here Kuenzli analyzes the reception of Vuillard’s Vaquez panels at the 1905 Salon d’Automne as marking the point at which a modernist narrative split off from the reception of Nabi painting, when the distortions, patterning, and flattening of 1896 were largely ignored by critics keen to signal the naturalism of Vuillard’s more recent work. Kuenzli highlights the residue, however, of a modernist reception in the very few critical comments on the kinds of attentive engagement demanded by the panels’ formal innovations. The chapter ends with one of the book’s strongest assertions: Vuillard’s “Vaquez panels need to be seen alongside Matisse’s Woman with a Hat and Cézanne’s Bathers at Rest as challenging and innovative works that define fin-de-siècle modernism” (208). This claim, with its attitude of passionate partisanship, sums up Kuenzli’s aims throughout the book.

The short conclusion brings the book up to Henri Matisse, positioning the Nabis as forerunners of, and interlocutors for, the now-famous formulation of an “armchair aesthetic” in Matisse’s 1908 “Notes of a Painter.” Kuenzli here reiterates her larger point that the home, as envisioned by the Nabis, functioned as a critical locus for the development of modernist painting, as a place where the imagination might be most effectively provoked, stimulated, and engaged. Ultimately, Kuenzli argues that in synthesizing the “individual and the collective, sensation and ornament, private and public spheres” (177), the Nabis aimed to create an environment that would critique bourgeois individualism by generating conditions in which the boundaries of the self could be escaped. The idea that Nabi painting aimed to provide an escape from the self, and, in particular, the assertion that Nabi decorations afforded their patrons opportunities to transcend gender, are enticing arguments. The latter plays out in an especially intriguing way in Kuenzli’s reading of the Vaquez panels, in which she points to how feminine elements intrude upon the traditionally masculine space of the study.

One might further probe the nature of this self that needed escaping to ask what purchase the Nabis and their patrons—for the most part well-educated men from bourgeois homes—had on particular notions of French subjectivity. Just who was that businessman sinking into his armchair, and how did he conceive of himself in relation to his world? The writings of Jean-Paul Bouillon and Filiz Burhan, exploring the bearing of the lycée philosophy curriculum on the thinking of Denis and Sérusier, and that of Patricia Mathews on gendered subjectivities within symbolist artistic circles, provide the means to further flesh out the contours of the self at stake here.⁴ In raising the question of the relationship between Nabi decorative painting and the self, Kuenzli’s book is a welcome addition to the growing English-language literature on this important, if still ill-defined group of artists, and productively furthers the scholarship on the nature of the vexed relationship between decoration and modernism.