Maurice Denis

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was a French painter, printmaker and writer, and the chief theorist of Les Nabis, the Symbolist group he helped found in 1890. His 1890 manifesto declared that a picture is “essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order” — a foundational idea for modern art. A devout Catholic nicknamed “le nabi aux belles icônes,” he devoted much of his later career to religious painting and church decoration, founding the Ateliers d’Art Sacré in 1919. Denis was avidly collected in Japan from the Taishō era onward: the painter Umehara Ryūzaburō studied under him at the Académie Ranson, and Kojirō Matsukata’s acquisitions gave Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art the largest holding of his work outside France.