The Temple of Flat Reality
Paul Ranson didn't care about the depth of your living room. In 1890, while the rest of Paris was still trying to figure out how light hit a haystack, Ranson and his buddies in the Nabi circle were busy turning reality into a flat, decorative puzzle. They called their shared studio The Temple. If it sounds pretentious, that’s because it was. They were young and convinced that art was a sacred rite, not just a mirror for the bored middle class.
Look at Two Acts. You won't find the soft, round curves of a classical nude here. Ranson stripped away the three-dimensional modeling that had defined Western art for centuries. He wasn't being lazy. He was radical. He looked at Japanese woodblocks and saw a better way to tell a story, taking the human form and flattening it into a rhythmic pattern of heavy outlines and bold shapes. It was 1890, in the Salon des Independants, and the world was changing.
This wasn't about what a body looks like in a doctor's office. It was about how a soul feels in a dream. By rejecting the illusion of space, Ranson forced you to look at the surface. He turned the canvas into a tapestry of symbols. The lines move with a pulse that feels more like music than paint. Ranson died in 1909, right before the world really went to hell, but in this small oil on canvas he left a blueprint for everything that came after. Reality is overrated. Pattern is eternal.
References
Hyman, Timothy. Bonnard. London, Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Ranson-Bitker, Brigitte. Paul Ranson, Catalogue Raisonné. Paris, Somogy, 1999.
Silverman, Debora. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989.