The Nabis. Albert Kostenevitch

work of Puvis de Chavannes, by no means as daring in colour as the canvases of Manet, Monet or Degas, was destined to become a kind of banner for the following generation of artists. This generation dreamt of murals, of an “eternal” type of art; the young painters were fascinated by the promise which Puvis de Chavannes’ painting held; they saw that contemporary easel painting could stimulate meditation on life, breaking through the realm of purely visual facts. Maurice Denis, who loved to express himself in the language of a manifesto, formulated the aesthetic credo of his milieu in the following way: “We insist on the idea that the visible is a manifestation of the invisible, that forms and colours are indications of the state of our soul.”[11]