Striped Soul and Sinuous Lines
Paul Ranson cared about the rhythm of the jungle. It was 1893 in Paris and everyone was looking east for inspiration. The Nabis imagined themselves the new cool kids on the block and they were tired of the messy light of the Impressionists. They wanted something flatter and harder. They wanted soul wrapped in a pattern.
Ranson sat down with a lithographic stone and stripped the tiger of its teeth. He turned a lethal predator into a series of sinuous curves. The animal doesn't stand against the jungle. It becomes the jungle. The stripes of the beast and the leaves of the plants are the same language of line. This is the heavy influence of the newly arrived Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints showing through. It is a world where depth is a lie and decoration is the only truth.
When Andre Marty published this in the first portfolio of L'Estampe originale he wasn't just selling a print, he was announcing a new era. This was the DNA of Art Nouveau being written in real time. Ranson used flat planes of color to reject the three-dimensional world that artists had been obsessed with since the Renaissance. He proved that a small piece of paper could hold an entire philosophy of design. It was about how a line could feel like a heartbeat. It was about the way a shape could haunt a room without ever making a sound.
References
Frèches-Thory, Claire and Antoine Terrasse. The Nabis. Paris, Flammarion, 2002.
Ives, Colta Feller. The Great Wave. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.
Stein, Donna and Donald Karshan. L'Estampe Originale. New York, Museum of Graphic Art, 1970.