Maurice Denis raises the debate
About the exhibition Maurice Denis - Bonheur rêvé
Until 29 May 2022
Why stop at this painting by Maurice Denis entitled Eve in the Forest, which seems to have been lost in the pages of this month's Beaux-Arts? Because in the midst of an iconography that is sometimes glamorous, sometimes sober but polished, stamped FIAC 2021, a diaphanous painting suddenly emerges, inhabited by a spirit. The Spirit. All the rest of it seems sympathetic, certainly seductive but hollow. In such a context, welcome to Nabism. Because thanks to it, reality suddenly returns to 4D. At last. And why? Because the spiritual, so much vaunted elsewhere in art, is not here a practical word that can easily justify the hermeticism to which works that have nothing to say are condemned.
The spiritual dimension, dear to Maurice Denis' emulation of Gaughin, is not the name of vagueness. It is not a smoky alibi for its emptiness, referring to the secrets of a necessarily tortured personality, which it is fashionable to systematically label artists, those poor hyper-sensitive beings delivered in spite of themselves to the cruelty of the world. The spiritual dimension of Denis's art is deeply structuring in this Eve in the Forest, which is not without hints of Déjeuner sur l'herbe in its nudity prosaically delivered in a natural setting.
Except that here everything is vertical. Except for Adam, who is shown in the lower right-hand corner of the painting with his back to three quarters, in the position of a spectator transfixed by the beauty of this woman who exposes herself and looks us in the eye in the centre of the canvas. In the centre in width but not in height. For Eve is and is not the subject of the canvas. Is she, however, a sumptuous diversion? In contrast to Douanier Rousseau's Dream, the natural setting invites the frame not to focus on the human being, but in height, not in width. As if to better highlight the green setting in which this bait with its bare charms is placed. Denis' nature does not abound horizontally. It prefers the more austere vertical extension of pale pink trunks that grow to such heights that they manage to keep their foliage suggestively out of view. The Most High is not represented. But everything leads the eye to him. Between my mimesis and abstraction, a third space called evocation is reinvented.
With her arms raised above her head, hands clasped to enclose a virginal white bouquet, Eve stares at us, offered. But her legs are modestly crossed, which avoids any provocative Amazon determination. We do the thing, but timidly. As if it were a first. We venture out, we risk our lives. As if the latter were not enough. Nor is it enough for Adam, who is visibly impressed by the modest but determined audacity of his wife, who nonetheless reduces him to a role of extra, close to caudalism. For it is indeed a visual seduction, a very particular happening that constitutes the subject of a work in which eroticism is present but pointed out as insufficient. Love in public demand of sublimation.
Illustration: Maurice Denis Eve in the forest 1924