Paul Sérusier

Paul Sérusier (born November 9, 1864, Paris—died October 6, 1927, Morlaix, France) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and theorist who was instrumental in the formation of the short-lived, but highly influential, late 19th-century art movement known as the Nabis. The group was noted for its expressive use of colour and pattern in the mode of Paul Gauguin. Sérusier’s early paintings featuring the people and landscapes of Brittany are noteworthy for their muted, contemplative mood, which the artist achieved by using firm contours and blocks of unmodulated colour.

Sérusier’s father was a businessman of Flemish descent. As a boy, Sérusier attended the Lycée Condorcet, a secondary school that placed much emphasis on the study of philosophy, and he received a baccalaureate in letters in 1883. Not much interested in the sales job that his practical father helped him obtain, he determined to become an artist and in 1885 entered the Académie Julian, a noted private art school in Paris. While there he met and befriended the young Maurice Denis, who would become a major influence in the revival of religious art in France. During the summer of 1888 Sérusier traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany, which was a popular gathering place for artists. There he met French painter and theorist Émile Bernard, who at the time was engaged in translating the theories of the Symbolist poets to the medium of paint. That summer, in conversations and painting sessions, Bernard and his friend Paul Gauguin developed their notions about the freedom to move beyond Impressionism and its studies of light and nature—to simplify, interpret, and arrange nature.

On the last day of his vacation, Sérusier painted with Gauguin, who encouraged him to forgo modeling, perspective, and all such attempts at three-dimensional effects and to use a simplified colour palette. The experience brought about an epiphany. Sérusier produced an unfinished painting—a demonstration of technique, really—that he took back to Paris to show his friends. Formally called Landscape at the Bois d’Amour at Pont-Aven (1888), it was known to the Nabis as The Talisman, and it is considered the first Nabi painting. Although by the summer of 1889 Sérusier’s enthusiasm for Gauguin’s work had begun to subside, he joined Gauguin at Pont-Aven in the summer and later in the year at the Breton village of Le Pouldu. There, in addition to working on a philosophy of painting based on the Synthetism practiced by Gauguin, Sérusier developed his lifelong working method: sketching in plein air and completing the work away from the subject, in the studio. He also felt a growing appreciation for the landscape and isolation of Brittany.

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Sérusier returned to Paris in the fall of 1889, but he again joined Gauguin at Le Pouldu in the summer of 1890. That year he quit the Académie Julian, being out of sympathy with its philosophy, and began to work on his own. The Nabis continued to meet on a regular basis, extending their group to include several individuals with Symbolist credentials, writers, musicians, actors, and others. By the mid-1890s, however, the Nabis—most of whom remained friends—had developed individual styles, and Sérusier himself had become deeply involved with theosophy. When his Polish mistress, Gabriela Zapolska, suddenly left him in 1895, Sérusier escaped to the solitude of Châteauneuf-du-Faou in Brittany. In a low state of mind, in 1897 or ’98 he visited, for the first of several times, the Benedictine abbey of Beuron in Germany, which was the site of an influential art school. He was deeply influenced by their concepts of religious symbolism and geometry and sacred proportions in composition. Sérusier continued to develop his philosophy and to paint and sketch according to it, and in 1908 he began teaching colour theory at the newly established Académie Ranson. During this period he crystallized the principles he laid out in his ABC de la peinture (1921).

He married in 1912, but the marriage was unhappy. His wife was confined to an institution in Morlaix for long periods of time. Sérusier retired to Brittany in 1914, though he continued to travel and to see friends. Most critics consider his work beyond this point inferior to that of his early years.