Les Nabis
ナビ派 / 1888–1900 / Style / Symbolism and Ornament
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.
Compositions conceived as decorative panels / Reversals of pattern and ground / Harmonies of muted intermediate tones / Subjects of interiors and daily life
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Warm lifestyle branding built on pattern-on-pattern interiors · Book covers and endpapers where figure and wallpaper merge
- Type
- Soft, slightly irregular serifs or hand-drawn titling woven into the pattern
- Composition
- Tall panel formats; figures embedded in wallpaper-like pattern until motif and ground trade places
- Material
- Muted intermediate tones—dusty rose, olive, ochre—on matte, absorbent surfaces
- Caution
- Avoid isolating the figure from its patterned ground; the intimacy depends on subject and décor sharing one flat weave.
- Further study
- The story of Sérusier's The Talisman / The work in decorative panels and lithography / The subjects of Intimisme