Les Nabis

Les Nabis, Hebrew for prophets, was a group of young Post-Impressionist painters formed in Paris around 1888 by Paul Serusier, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, taking their initial inspiration from Paul Gauguin's flattened forms and bold, non-naturalistic color, seen in Serusier's small landscape study The Talisman, painted under Gauguin's direct guidance at Pont-Aven. The group treated painting as a decorative, symbolic surface built from flat color patterns rather than a window onto observed reality, a principle Denis summarized in his famous statement that a picture is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order. Working across painting, decorative panels, theater design and printmaking, the Nabis dissolved as a formal group by around 1900, but Bonnard and Vuillard continued developing its intimate, richly patterned interiors into what critics later called Intimism.