Montreal, Canada - 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 the French painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943), whose work, imbued with poetic symbolism, was influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Denis, a famous theorist and critic in his day, was a versatile artist.  Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise will comprise about a hundred paintings, decorative art and works on paper, as well as never before exhibited photographs taken by the artist.  This retrospective, which takes into account the most recent studies of Denis, will restore his reputation as one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, and one of the best-known members of the circle of painters called the Nabis.  The exhibition, to be shown 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.

The show reveals all the diverse aspects of the long career of this artist, dubbed “the Nabi of the beautiful icons” for the works inspired by his spiritual studies: he was also an exponent of the Symbolist movement; the theoretician of a new classicism characterized by a preference for figurative painting; a music lover; and finally a decorative artist who stood apart from the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.  Thanks to the generosity of lenders, major paintings like The Muses, Mystic Harvest, Procession under the Trees (Green Trees), Tribute to Cézanne and Ladder in the Leaves will appear in the exhibition.  Visitors will also find lesser-known works demonstrating unfamiliar aspects of the oeuvre 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, portraits in which, as in his paintings, motherhood and the family are idealized.

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 indépendants in 1890.  Becoming one of the painter Henry Lerolle’s close circle, he met many leading figures of Impressionism and Symbolism, including Degas, Renoir, Mallarmé, Gide, 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, which in 1980, became the Musée Maurice Denis as the result of a family gift. Between 1895 and 1898, Denis 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, his painting was increasingly marked by his spiritual and religious quests.  He created large-scale murals and helped to found the Ateliers d’art sacré. His output as a theoretician and historian of art continued, and his written work was published in 1922 under the title Nouvelles théories sur l’art moderne, sur l’art sacré.  Maurice Denis died in 1943.  The diary he had kept since his teens was published in 1957.

In Paris, the chief curator of the exhibition Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise is Serge Lemoine, President of the Musée d’Orsay; in Montreal the general curator is Guy Cogeval, Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and an acknowledged expert on the Nabi painters.  The catalogue, edited by Jean-Paul Bouillon, includes a number of fresh perspectives on the work of Maurice Denis.  This fully illustrated 300-page reference work has been published in French by the Réunion des musées nationaux in Paris, and in English by Skira, Milan.  The catalogue essays were written by authorities on Denis’s oeuvre; they include the first studies of Denis as a photographer and of his international influence in Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, Russia and Quebec (Borduas was his pupil at the Ateliers d’art sacré).

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