The Cigar Box Revolution
Paul Sérusier was just a student at the Académie Julian who spent a summer in Pont-Aven trying to find himself. He found Paul Gauguin instead. In 1888 the woods of Brittany weren't just trees and dirt, they were a laboratory. Gauguin looked at a patch of forest and told Sérusier to stop thinking and start seeing. If a tree looks yellow, make it the brightest yellow on your palette. If the shadows are blue, use pure ultramarine.
Sérusier grabbed the lid of a wooden cigar box. He didn't have a canvas ready but he had the itch to paint. He squeezed colors directly from the tube and smeared them onto the wood. He didn't mix them. He didn't soften the edges. The result was a tiny board covered in blocks of flat and vibrant color. It was only twenty-seven centimeters tall but it held the weight of a whole new world.
When he got back to Paris and showed it to his friends they thought it was a joke or a mistake. It looked like a landscape accident. The image was so abstract you could barely find the river or the trees. But for the young radicals who would call themselves the Nabis, this cigar box lid was a sacred object. They named it The Talisman. It was the proof they needed that a painting wasn't a window into a room or a mirror of nature, just a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order. Sérusier didn't just paint a landscape that day. He killed the old world on a piece of trash and paved the way for every abstract painter who ever picked up a brush.
References
Sérusier, Paul. The Talisman. 1888. Oil on wood. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Boyle-Turner, Caroline. Paul Sérusier. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983.
Chassé, Charles. The Nabis and Their Period. Translated by Michael Bullock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.