Paul Serusier

A student and monitor at the Academie Julian in the 1880s, Paul Serusier, a post-impressionist painter, became part of a group of artists, Les Nabis, influenced by Paul Gauguin.  Most of these artists such as Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Ibels, Paul Ranson and Edouard Vuillard, had been students at the Academie Julian and, taking their group names from the word 'prophets', were dedicated to avant-garde styles of painting.  They exhibited together between 1890 and 1896, and after that, pretty much disbanded because they were establishing their own reputations.

Serusier, with others, had spent time with Gauguin in Brittany at Pont-Aven, an artists' colony that Serusier first visited in 1888.   Under the direction of Gauguin, he painted The Talisman, which is now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.  "Gauguin encouraged the young painter to release himself from the constraints of imitative painting, to use pure colors, not to hesitate to exaggerate his impressions, and to give to painting his individual decorative logic and symbolic system." (ArtinthePicture.com) The name was given to the painting by Serusier's artist friends because it was a harbinger of new messages about art.  Using it as a prop or example of 'things-to-come', Serusier stirred rousing debates among many French artists.

In 1892, Serusier returned to Brittany, working for two years in the village of Huelgoat.  Local peasants were subjects of many of his paintings, which were also more subdued in color than his previous work. Returning to Paris in the winter months, he joined Nabis friends in theatrical set and costume designing of Symbolist plays.   In 1895, he went to Germany to the Benedictine monastery of monk artists at Beuron.  These monks were committed to the philosophy that laws of beauty were dictated by a divine source whose truths could be discovered in the proportions of forms and sizes in nature.  Serusier was enthusiastic about the ideas, but his Parisien artist friends were not, and this rejection led to him distancing himself from the Nabis.

For the remainder of his career, Serusier, after several more visits to Beuron, settled in Brittany where he applied the theories of the Beuron monks to his paintings.  Additional influences were his studies of Egyptian art, Italian primities and tapestries of the Middle Ages.  From 1908, Serusier taught in Paris at the Academie Ranson, founded by Paul Ranson who had been a part of the Nabis group.  Serusier also wrote a book, ABC de la Peinture, published in 1921.

Paul Serusier died in 1927 in Morlaix, France.  He had been raised in a relatively affluent middle class French family supported by the father's employment with the perfume industry.  Classical education was important to this family and Paul studied classical philosophy, Greek and Latin at the Condorcet Lycee and graduated with degrees in philosophy and science.  In 1885, he entered the Academy Julian, where he met Maurice Denis, who became a close lifelong friend.