Avril ou Les anémones

As a young man, Maurice Denis often went strolling in the forests surrounding Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the commune northwest of Paris where he grew up. He took pleasure in the trees’ geometries and colours, writing in his journal of ‘a delightful part…where the crooked, twisted, tall, bushy, spaced out, some yellow, others green or grey. To an artist’s eye, it is so beautiful it makes you faint…’ (quoted in Maurice Denis: 1870-1943, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 1994, p. 119) This landscape would provide the setting for several of Denis’ important early paintings including Jeu de volant (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) as well as the present work, Avril or Les anémones.
In this idealised image, Denis has painted the forest using natural colours and ornamental pointillism to render the space dreamlike. A sinuous path curves through the dense wood. Branches curl in every direction and the word 'Avril' can be seen carved into the trunk on the lefthand side. In the foreground, a young girl picks white blossoms. Behind, the same woman, now dressed in white, kneels on the ground. In the background, a couple is silhouetted against the trees. Together the figures represent a romantic visualisation of a life, from childhood through to marriage. Painted when Denis was only twenty years, Avril already encapsulates several themes that would remain central to his practice throughout his career, namely the life cycle, an idyllic youth, and the beauty of the natural world.
It was during his adolescence that Denis decided to pursue a career in painting. He greatly admired Fra Angelico’s Le couronnement de la Vierge, which he saw at the Musée du Louvre, as well as more contemporary canvases by Puvis de Chavannes, several of which were exhibited at Durand-Ruel in 1887. Denis found the ‘decorative, calm and simple appearance of [the latter’s] paintings very beautiful’ and went on to compliment the backgrounds (quoted in ibid., p. 21). Like Chavannes, Denis, too, set his figures in ornamental grounds and often arranged them hierarchically in worlds that feel at once secular and sacred, imaginary yet tangible.
In pursuit of his artistic education, Denis enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian, in 1888, alongside his future Nabis cohort, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard; they would move to studios at 28 rue Pigalle by the end of the decade. Decorative simplification was to become key to their bourgeoning art practices, which probed the symbolic and spiritual possibilities of art. A sense of rhythmic patterning is central to Avril in which the verticality of the trees is offset by the twisting forest path. Dots of pigment adorn the bark and grasses, a nod to Georges Seurat, whose work Denis greatly esteemed. In Denis’ idyll, garlands wrap their leafy vines and white, astral anemones cover the ground like constellations spread across the night sky. This is a world that appears untouched by time or the forces of modernisation that were upending France’s landscapes during this period. Instead, Denis has conjured an arcadia in paint.
Avril was initially owned by Arsène Alexandre, the art critic, who acquired the painting directly from the artist. Alexandre was one of the first to use the term Neo-impressionism and was close to many celebrated artists and writers of his age. The painting was later in the collection of Alfred Stoclet, the Belgian engineer and patron of the arts. It was displayed in Stoclet’s home in Brussels, which was designed by Josef Hofmann, a founder of both Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte. The building’s interior was decorated with large mosaic friezes by Gustave Klimt. Avril hung in a small sitting room, close to a painting by Theo van Rysselberghe and not far from Klimt’s glimmering murals.