Located in Saint Germain en Laye in the Yvelines, the departmental museum Maurice Denis houses in the former residence of the painter, a rich collection of Nabi, Symbolist and Post-Impressionist artists.
Maurice Denis (1870-1943) acquired this property in 1914 and made it the crucible of his creative activity and his family life.
Initially, the fund bequeathed by the Denis family to the Department included more than 1,500 works. But over the past three decades, the collections have been greatly enriched. They form a coherent and important whole over a key period in the history of art, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Alike his friends from the Nabi group, Maurice Denis reacted to Impressionism while borrowing his light touches, sensitive to the influence of a Renoir or a Pissarro. He will study the work of Paul Cézanne, about whom he wrote: "Cézanne's example taught us to transpose the data of sensation into elements of works of art".
A pupil of the Julian Academy and of Gustave Moreau, Maurice Denis will explain his aesthetic thought in a work "Theories" whose subtitle was: "From Symbolism and Gauguin, towards a new classical order".
But it is in Paul Cézanne that he will see the strongest proximity to his own artistic approach, based on the fact that "to paint is to record colored sensations" He will visit the old master in 1906, in Aix. He will make of this meeting a painting "Visit to Cézanne", in a surprisingly impressionist style.
Musée Départemental Maurice Denis
2 bis, rue Maurice Denis
78100 Saint-Germain-en-Laye
In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...
