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

Thesis

This project focuses on the decorative work of the painter Maurice Denis (1870 – 1943), who is perhaps best known for his involvement with the Nabis, a group of young painters culturally prominent in the Paris of the early 1890s. Much work remains to be done on assessing the wider significance both of his turn-of-the-century ‘conversion’ to classicism, and of his increasingly earnest determination to revitalize sacred art in France. Therefore my thesis concentrates primarily on the artist’s post-Nabi decorative work, and how it was not only shaped by, but also helped to strengthen, classicising and religious tendencies within French art, as well as associated conservative ideological currents within French culture more broadly. The thesis considers how Denis’s life-long commitment to establishing an artistic doctrine, a ‘French order’, rooted in a tradition both Catholic and classical, entered into cultural debates stimulated by the consequences of such events as the Dreyfus Affair (1894 – 1906), the Separation of the Church and the State in 1905 and the First World War. Denis himself was well aware that decorative commissions (both public and domestic) were frequently understood as reflecting contemporary social values. I argue that an examination of Denis’s links to his musical contemporaries (principally the composer Vincent d’Indy and the pupils of César Franck), who themselves were active in these debates on matters of cultural identity, reveals much about the significance of his art and of the wider character of a renascent cultural nationalism in early twentieth-century France. By seeing his work as drawn into the ambit of France’s musical world, we will, I hope, go some way towards understanding Denis’s importance in the more general context of the period’s ideology and aesthetics.

Authors: Coombes, RE

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-2zq4z76yx
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: art history; neo-classicism; symbolism; France; music; Third Republic; post-Impressionism; Catholicism; decorative art
• Subjects: Arts and religion; Art, French; National characteristics, French, in art; Classicism in art; Music--French influences