Paul Srusier (1864–1927) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, one of the most influential members of the Nabi group. The Nabis were committed to revolutionising painting, through the increased use of colour, symbolism and decorative design. Born in Paris, Srusier was educated in a traditional manner before studying art at the Acadmie Julian.
It was not until his introduction to Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany, in 1888 that his artistic career was truly launched.
Under Gauguin’s influence Srusier painted a small landscape The Talisman, a painting with drastically simplified shapes and intense colours, which would not traditionally have been used to describe the subject. When Srusier left Paris to return to Brittany the painting was adopted as a key work by the young men who would go on to form the Nabi group. Srusier was captured by colour, symbolism, spirituality, geometry, and the painter’s relationship to nature. His later articles on the subject of art and colour, such as ABC de la peinture (1921) confirmed him as a theorist of modern colour as well as a painter.
Early Life
Paul Srusier was born in Paris in 1864. His relatively bourgeois upbringing meant that he was initially educated at the Lyce Condorcet in a very traditional and classical style, before the call for a more intensive philosophical and cultural study was made and he developed an interest in the intellectual issues underlying art and the education of the individual artist. By the mid-1880s he had begun his serious training as a painter and moved to the Acadmie Julian, Paris, an alternative and unofficial art school where many of the young artists who would later form the group studied. He became friends with artists Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson and Gabriel Ibels, which would later prove fundamental in the group dynamic of the Nabis.
Inspiration
It was in 1888 that Srusier’s artistic breakthrough occurred when he travelled to Brittany, to the Saint-Goustan area in the then little known village of Pont-Aven where he met Paul Gauguin. The latter instructed him to leave behind a naive copying of nature and to begin to represent what he saw in a series of visual relationships of colour and form. Srusier achieved this in The Talisman, a small painting constructed with simplified shapes in un-usually strong colours, which, upon returning to Paris, was recognised by the people at the Acadmie Julian as so radical as to initiate the formation of the group known as the Nabis or Prophets in Hebrew.
Throughout his life, Brittany was a central inspiration source, not only with regard to the landscape, but also its religious customs and farming community. Srusier was also inspired by Japanese prints, Symbolism, the Synthetism of Gauguin and ultimately, the medieval and geometrical ideas of the Beuron art school. Gradually the naturalism of his early work evolved into a more flatly defined space with clear, delineated contours, stronger decorative patterns and colour symbolism. Late in his career, Srusier’s obsession with philosophy and spirituality led to studies into geometry, religious proportions and colour- theories.
Impact
His greatest contribution as an artist was to link Post-Impressionism and Symbolism to the language of modern art. The Talisman could be seen as a kind of manifesto for the Nabis because it showed that a painting need not be a literal representation of nature-colour and shape could establish an autonomous visual reality. He laid intellectual as well as pictorial, foundation for the movement, urging painters to think of a work of art as a new kind of architecture, an ordered puzzle of colour, line and rhythm rather than a mere view of the world.
His influence continued in his teaching at the Acadmie Ranson from 1908 and in his writings. ABC de la peinture of 1921 explored relationships between adjacent colours, the contrasts of hot and cold, and the organization of pictorial space. His increasingly geometric compositions preluded several features of abstract art in the 20th century.
Conclusion
As much as for the paintings he made, Srusier’s legacy lies in the questions he raised about what painting can become. If it was Gauguin at Pont-Aven that gave Paul Srusier the key to break free from naturalism, it was The Talisman that provided the young Nabis with a visual language by which colour and form could be divorced from representation. Whether it was the Breton landscape and figures, or his geometric experimentation in his later career, Srusier was constantly searching for an underlying order to painting. From Post-Impressionism in the late 1800s to early modern art, more radical abstraction and formal experimentation, Srusier is an important figure in the evolution of paint colour from being simply descriptive to becoming an active subject in its own right.