First North American Presentation At Montreal Museum

From February 22 to May 20, 2007, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will present a major exhibition, the first retrospective ever shown in North America of Maurice Denis (1870-1943). Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise will comprise about a hundred paintings, large-scale decorative paintings and many works on paper, as well as photographs taken by the artist that have never before been exhibited.

This retrospective will restore Denis's reputation as one of the most celebrated artists of his generation and one of the best-known members, alongside Bonnard and Vuillard, of the circle of painters called the "Nabis" (the prophets). The exhibition, presented in Paris, Montreal and Rovereto, is organized by the Musée d'Orsay and the Réunion des musées nationaux in Paris, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy.

A founding member of the Nabis, Denis was the theorist of this movement, whose goal was to renew painting and the decorative arts in the 1890s. However, the work of "the Nabi of the beautiful icons," a nickname he was given for the works inspired by his spiritual and religious studies, transcended this circle: regenerated by Classicism around 1900, it continued to explore, until the artist's death, a distinctive path tending towards "the supreme goal of painting, the large-scale decorative painting."

Denis, who was also a renowned critic of the day, expressed himself through monumental decorative paintings, easel paintings, the graphic and decorative arts and - as we have recently learned - through photography. The themes of the exhibition evoke the various facets of Denis's long career: "The Spiritual in Art," "The Nabis Avant-garde," "Marthe's Love in the Time of Symbolism," "At the Margins of Art Nouveau," "Towards a New Classical Order," "Sketchbooks from Travels in Italy," "The Beach and the Studio in the Time of Harmony," and "Through the Painter's Lens: Maurice Denis Up Close."

Thanks to the generosity of several institutions, in particular the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée départemental Maurice Denis and private collectors, including Claire Denis, the artist's granddaughter and editor of the Maurice Denis catalogue raisonné, major paintings like The Muses, Homage to Cézanne, Ladder in the Foliage and The Legend of Saint Hubert will appear in the exhibition. Visitors will also find lesser-known works demonstrating unfamiliar aspects of the artist's Å“uvre, as well as the links between the paintings and the large decorative works Denis executed for private patrons or government commissions, in the tradition of wall painting inspired by the Italian Renaissance masters.

Like Vuillard and Bonnard, Denis was captivated by the Kodak camera and took many pictures of his wife and children. On the occasion of the exhibition, Claire Denis has generously offered as a gift to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts a set of twenty-four of her grandfather's photographs that have never before been exhibited in public.

Born in Granville in 1870, Denis was a brilliant student at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where he made friends with Édouard Vuillard and Ker Xavier Roussel. Later, at the Académie Julian, he came to know Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and other future Nabis. He went on to study at the École des beaux-arts (1888-1891) and exhibited for the first time at the Salon de la Société des artistes français in 1890.

Becoming one of the painter Henry Lerolle's close circle, he met many leading figures of Impressionism and Symbolism, including Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir, as well as writers Stéphane Mallarmé and André Gide and composers Claude Debussy and Ernest Chausson. In 1893, he married Marthe Meurier, who was to become his muse and give him seven children. The family later moved to Le Prieuré, a historic mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. In 1980, this impressive residence became the Musée Maurice Denis as the result of a gift from the family. Between 1895 and 1898, Denis often spent time in Brittany and Italy, and his love of Italian Renaissance art and the classical tradition is evident in his work. He first became known as a member of the group called the Nabis, the "prophets" of modern art. At the dawn of the twentieth century, he created large-scale murals and helped to found the Ateliers d'art sacré in 1919, while his output as a theorist and historian of art intensified. Denis died in 1943. The Journal he had kept since his teens was published in 1959.

The Chief Curators of the exhibition Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise are Serge Lemoine, President of the Musée d'Orsay, and Guy Cogeval, former Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and an acknowledged expert on the Nabis. The curatorial committee is headed by Jean-Paul Bouillon, professor at the Université Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, a member of the Institut universitaire de France and author of several seminal books on the artist; the curators are Nathalie Bondil, Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Sylvie Patry, Curator of Paintings, and Isabelle Gaëtan, Head of Documentary Studies, both of the Musée d'Orsay. Indispensable collaboration was provided by Claire Denis, and her whole team working on the catalogue raisonné of her grandfather's oeuvre.

The catalogue, edited by Jean-Paul Bouillon, includes a number of fresh perspectives on the work of Maurice Denis. This fully illustrated reference work has been published in French and English by the Réunion des musées nationaux in Paris. The catalogue essays examine for the first time the artist's international influence in Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, Russia and even Quebec (Borduas studied under Denis at the Ateliers d'art sacré).

The exhibition Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise has obtained assistance from Canadian Heritage through the Canada Travelling Exhibitions Indemnification Program. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts wishes to thank Air Canada as well as La Presse and The Gazette, its media partners. Its gratitude also extends to Quebec's Ministère de la Culture et des Communications and to the Conseil des arts de Montréal for their ongoing support.

The international exhibition programme of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts receives financial support from the Exhibition Fund of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Foundation and the Paul G. Desmarais Fund. -- www.mmfa.qc.ca