Cloisonnism vs Les Nabis
クロワゾニスム / ナビ派
Both sit in Fin de Siècle Art, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Cloisonnism
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A manner of painting named after the partitions of cloisonné enamel: flat fields of colour enclosed by heavy contour lines. It brought the way of seeing of ukiyo-e prints and stained glass into oil painting, abandoning shaded volume in favour of colour laid down from memory. The technique that prepared the flatness of the poster.
Les Nabis
A group of painters who called themselves prophets, setting out from the declaration that a picture is essentially a flat surface covered in a certain order. They extended interiors and daily life into decorative panels, lithographs, book illustration and stage design, dissolving the boundary between fine and applied art.
| Cloisonnism | Les Nabis | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1888–1895 | 1888–1900 |
| Family | Fin de Siècle Art | Fin de Siècle Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Thick, dark contour lines / Flat colour fields without shading / Decoratively simplified shapes / Colouring drawn from memory | Compositions conceived as decorative panels / Reversals of pattern and ground / Harmonies of muted intermediate tones / Subjects of interiors and daily life |
| Best used for | Work built cell by cell in separate colours, like stained glass or tilework · Drawing a remembered landscape in simple shapes and colour rather than from life | Designing the walls of a home or shop as a continuous field between picture and wallpaper · Series of illustrations, endpapers and prints that take the everyday interior as subject |
| Type | Set lettering outside the cells in black at the keyline weight, hand drawn or slab | Soft, slightly irregular serifs or hand-drawn titling woven into the pattern |
| Composition | Divide the picture into a few large cells, edge to edge, partitioned by heavy lines | Tall panel formats; figures embedded in wallpaper-like pattern until motif and ground trade places |
| Material | Flat unmodulated colour from memory inside dark contours, with no shadow or gradient | Muted intermediate tones—dusty rose, olive, ochre—on matte, absorbent surfaces |
| Caution | Adding heavy outlines afterwards produces no division of colour, only an ordinary picture inside lines. Letting shading or depth back into the cells breaks the enamel like flatness. | Matching figure and pattern too closely turns the picture into plain wallpaper, and who is doing what disappears. Sink the figure in, but keep its contour readable. |