Composing the decorative: Maurice Denis, music and the search for French cultural identity

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My project aims to investigate perceived affinities between the visual arts and music, as informing artistic production and theory in fin-de-siècle and early 20th-century France. It focuses on the decorative works of the painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943), a leading figure in the circle of painters known as the Nabis, and prominent in the French Catholic revival. Scholarly interest in the interaction between art and music has greatly increased in recent years (see Shephard and Leonard (2013)). But the work most considered in interdisciplinary studies has been 'modernist', in the sense of being characterized by such features as the self-conscious pursuit of experimentation, avant-gardisme or movement towards 'abstraction' (see, for example, Shaw-Miller (2002) and Albright (2000)). Neither the work of Denis and other Nabis nor its relationship to music fall comfortably within this scope of modernism, despite its art historical significance: Groom (2001) and Kuenzli (2010) insist on the centrality of the Nabis' decorations to fin-de-siècle culture. The importance for his painting of Denis's close involvement with composers, including Ernest Chausson, Vincent d'Indy and Claude Debussy, is a neglected area of research: only one largely biographical account exists on the subject (Grivel (2011)). Denis's early theoretical texts have absorbed art-historical attention to the neglect of his painting. But this painting was central to certain cultural currents at the fin-de-siècle, which have been somewhat side-lined within those narratives of 'modernism' that tend to historical linearity (see Thomson (2004)). My study will reassess Denis's art-historical significance, considering his decorative oeuvre and writings in their contemporaneous contexts of aesthetic theory and, specifically, of the widespread aspiration to renew the French classical tradition, at a time of anxiety over the loss of purportedly 'French' qualities of order and clarity- an aspiration which united Denis with a particular circle of musicians. Did their unity of purpose reflect a desire for cultural wholeness, and strengthen the importance of perceived affinities between painting and music? If so, the character of Denis's decorative oeuvre might be understood to reflect the quest to sustain French cultural continuity, informed by ambitions shared with his musical friends. Art historical and musicological studies, including Shaw (2002) and Pasler (2009) have described how, around the turn of the century, both art forms were co-opted in efforts to promote certain ideologies. Public decorative art in particular was discussed in politically polarized terms, and often understood as reflecting contemporary social values. Art historical appreciation of Denis's work may have suffered from simplistic association with the rhetoric of reactionary writers. But Bouillon (2006) suggests that Denis's own political attitude remained subordinate to his aesthetic sincerity.One topic of investigation will be the convergence of art and music through metaphors in contemporaneous critical writings on Denis. A further area of research will be specific moments of performance, such as the concert of Gregorian chant that Denis hosted with the composer Maurice Emmanuel, at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1920. This experience of synthesis of art and music 'in the moment' can be traced to the influence of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art'), an ideal which permeated fin-de-siècle cultural thought. Denis understood his art as being comparable to music, in its potential to induce prayerful reverie. He found a manifestation of his 'conservative modernism' (Marlais (1992)) in the Wagnerite Vincent d'Indy's ambition to re-establish religious tradition as a central inspiration for modern music. Comparing the activities of d'Indy's Schola Cantorum and Denis's Ateliers d'Art Sacré will be a useful way to understand commonalities between painter and musician.