In the exhibition hall of La Pedrera, the undulating walls and irregular columns of Gaudí host until the end of June the exhibition "Els Nabís: de Bonnard a Vuillard", which presents for the first time in Barcelona a show exclusively dedicated to this group of artists who, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, decisively contributed to paving the way for the avant-gardes. "Nabí" comes from the Hebrew "neviim" and means "prophet", and that is exactly what the members of this group wanted to be: artists capable of announcing a new way of looking at the world and, above all, of conceiving painting, which no longer speaks only of impressionism but also of symbolism and an early expressionism.
The story begins in Paris, around 1888, centered on the figure of Paul Sérusier and a group of students from the Académie Julian who wanted to free themselves from academic conventions. Among them were names that would become fundamental for European art, such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard or Maurice Denis. Over time, other figures such as Félix Vallotton or Aristide Maillol would join, forming a heterogeneous circle united by the same ambition: to reinvent painting. Precisely at the same time that modernists were reinventing architecture, especially in Barcelona, in Paris audacity and pioneering spirit were eminently pictorial.
The exhibition will not please fans of the "sense of reality": the revolution this group proposed was not so much about representing reality as creating it. In making a new one, that surpassed the original reality. In reality, it was about rethinking what a painting truly was: as a final text on the wall reminds us, Maurice Denis formulated it with a famous phrase: "before being a horse or a human figure, a painting is a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order". This idea is the basis on which the world of painting began to turn upside down, for the first time in many centuries: reality was no longer monolithic, nor rigid, nor even necessarily realistic. And painting ceased to be just a window to the world to become an autonomous language made of forms, rhythms, and colors.
The exhibition at La Pedrera proposes a journey through all this transformation, with the necessary ambiance: champagne advertisement posters or theater programs, the new avenues of the City of Light, carriages, trams, omnibuses, concerts… Through this select succession of works, visitors discover how the Nabis progressively abandoned impressionistic naturalism to move towards a more symbolic, decorative, and subjective painting.
I would highlight the dancers by Pierre Bonnard, a small painting that almost goes unnoticed, but which seems to summarize an entire stylistic revolution: movement, soul, vital imprint in every stroke. And if in Bonnard's canvases light seems to dissolve into a vibrant and intimate palette, in Vuillard's domestic scenes, interiors are dense spaces of textures, where characters almost blend with the patterns. This interest in everyday life —rooms, gardens, seemingly insignificant moments— reveals one of the group's great intuitions: art can inhabit daily life.
I also appreciate the drawing of the clown with his back to the circus square, by Henri-Gabriel Ibels ("Au Cirque"), with an almost cinematic treatment of space and narrative. Or the fairies, witches, and forests in the section dedicated to esotericism (Denis, Ranson), with their tendency towards the classic composition of a naked woman with a cat. And, of course, the portraits by Aristide Maillol: serious women, with studied faces and solemn gestures, but also his small bronze sculpture of the washerwoman leaning over the river and, above all, his spectacular "Méditerranée", at the end of the exhibition, surely the jewel in the crown: "my intention —says Maillol— was to create a young, pure, luminous and noble figure. Is that not the Mediterranean spirit?" That it is, and that is this fantastic nude sculpted in 1905.
The Nabis, in fact, besides painting pictures, wanted to "restore the unity of the arts". That is why many of them also worked in the design of tapestries, stained glass, screens, posters, or wallpapers, seeking to integrate art into the domestic space and modern life. This idea of total art finds a particularly suggestive setting in La Pedrera, where modernist architecture already dissolves the boundary between structure and ornament.
The exhibition, organized with the support of the Musée d'Orsay, is very much worth it: it allows us to rediscover a moment of crucial transition between impressionism (almost exhausted) and the avant-gardes that had not yet exploded, all under the prophetic shadow of Gauguin. In that historical interstice, the Nabis acted as a true bridge. Without their exploration of color, symbol, and the decorative dimension, it would be difficult to understand the paths that artists like Matisse or the Fauvists would later follow. Therefore, if the Nabis proclaimed themselves prophets of the future, their paintings cannot but speak to us of the revelations of the present.