The Prophet in the Temple
Paul Ranson did not paint Christ and Buddha because he was looking to win a prize at the Salon. He painted it because he was part of a secret society that thought they could see through the veil of reality. They called themselves the Nabis. It means prophets in Hebrew. They spent their nights in a studio they called the Temple while the rest of Paris was still trying to figure out how to paint sunlight on water.
This piece is a map for the soul. Ranson took two of the biggest spiritual heavyweights in history and flattened them out into patches of pure color. He was done with the old tricks of three-dimensional space. To Ranson and his circle depth was just a lie that kept people from seeing the truth. They wanted symbols. They wanted the kind of art that felt like a punch to the gut and a prayer at the same time.
The lines in this canvas do not just sit there. They move in heavy arabesques that represent the hidden energy of the universe. It was a visual manifesto for the Theosophical movement which was sweeping through Paris like a fever. Ranson was trying to show that every religion is just a different dialect of the same language. He died in 1909 before the world turned into a meat grinder in the Great War. He left behind a world of flat color and flowing lines where the gods actually got along.
References
Ranson, Paul. Christ and Buddha. 1890. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.
Boyer, Patricia Eckert. The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde. New Brunswick. Rutgers University Press. 1988.
Frèches-Thory, Claire and Antoine Terrasse. The Nabis. New York. Harry N. Abrams. 1991.