Paul Sérusier

Paul Sérusier was a key figure in the French Post-Impressionist movement. Having enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1885, the defining moment in his artistic development came a few years later during a trip to Pont Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. Greatly influenced by their new symbolist style, known as Synthetism, he painted The Talisman under the watchful eye of Gauguin. This work was a highly abstract exercise in pure color and decorative design – part of a general move away from the idea of ‘representation’ that had underpinned both Classical and Impressionist painting. Sérusier went on to found the Nabi Movement (after the Hebrew word for “prophet”) along with likeminded painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard. He was arguably more important as a theorist than he was as an artist. After a visit to the German monastery of Beuron in 1897, he became increasingly preoccupied with religious symbolism.