Symbolism, or the search for a more spiritual art, shaped not only the poetry and literature of the fin de sieclebut also painting,

drama and music. As a reaction against the contemporary world, it could end up either in retreat from the world or in criticism of it. The  death of Manet in 1883 dealt a  blow to Impressionism, which embraced modern life and fixed the impressions it made, and artists  took new directions. In 1886 Gauguin discovered Brittany, with  its heaths and rocky coves, little chapels and traditional costumes.  'There I find the savage and  primitive,' he wrote, and by 1888 he had gathered a group of artists of the I86o  generation at the fishing  village  of Pont-Aven. These included Emile Bernard, who perfected  the cloisonne  method of painting, with  blocks of colour divided  by black lines, as in stained glass, and Paul Serusier, whose rendering of a landscape on the lid of Gauguin's cigar box became  the talisman of the group. '3   Linked to them was Maurice Denis, who took an oath on All Saints' Day   8 84 to remain always a Christian and announced in I886  that 'even the purest realism and naturalism  cannot satisfy . .. we must make an effort, a great effort, to bring Art back to its great master, who is God.''4 After Gauguin sailed to Tahiti in 1891 in search of more primitive societies,  this group became the core of the Nabis, including  Pierre Bonnard and  Edouard Vuillard. For them Denis wrote  a ma nifesto stating that  'before it becomes  a war-horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.''s  The  Nabis  were  keen to ap ply their techniques to  other  decorative arts,   such  as  tapestries  and stage sets,  and  Denis  had  been  at  the  Lycee Condorcet with avant-garde theatre  director  Aurelien  Lugné-Poë. Lugné-Poë and  the Nabis shared a studio in the rue Pigalle and  after  1893 the Nabis d esigned sets  and programmes for  the  north European idealist  d ra ma at the Theatre de !'Oeuvre, notably Pelléas et  Mélisande  by the Belgian Symbolist Maeterlinck  and  a string of Ibsen  plays  from  Rosmersholm  and  An Enemy  of the People to The  Master Builder in 1893, with not a single French play until 1894.'6

Maurice Denis. The Muses/Les Muses. 1893