The Sacred Flatness of the Muses
Maurice Denis didn't want to paint a window, he wanted to paint a wall. In 1893, while the rest of Paris was still arguing over how to capture the flicker of gaslight on water, Denis was looking backward to move forward. He was twenty-three years old and already tired of the world being explained by cold hard facts. The Fin de Siècle was settling over Europe like a velvet shroud. Science was busy mapping the physical world while the human soul felt increasingly hollow and abandoned.
The Muses is a visual manifesto for a group of young rebels known as the Nabis. They weren't interested in traditional perspective or the illusion of depth. Denis famously argued that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. You can see it here in the grove of chestnut trees inspired by the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The trees aren't receding into space; they are patterns on a screen.
Denis used his wife Marthe as the model for several figures in this quiet woods. She appears multiple times, blurring the line between the divine and the domestic. The work lacks traditional perspective, emphasizing the decorative nature of the canvas over the reality of the scene. It was a time of spiritualism and secret societies meeting in dark parlors. People were looking for meaning in patterns and shadows rather than the metal skeleton of the new Eiffel Tower looming over the city. Denis gave them a sanctuary made of Art Nouveau curves and silent, rhythmic trees.
References
Denis, Maurice. Du Symbolisme au Classicisme: Théories. Paris: Hermann, 1964.
Clement, Russell T. Les Nabis: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1996.
Cogeval, Guy. Maurice Denis: 1870-1943. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2006.