SÉRUSIER, Paul

French painter, who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde movement Les NabisGLOSSARYLes Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian (Académie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s. Paul Sérusier galvanized Les Nabis, and provided the name and disseminated the example of Paul Gauguin among them. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis became the best known of the group., SynthetismGLOSSARYA term that attained significance in the School of Pont-Aven, used primarily by Paul Gauguin to describe his method of picture development. In this method, the pictorial theme is stored in the mind of the artist in a process of thought synthesis and then applied to the canvas from memory. The result is not necessarily natural colours, but imaginary forms and decorative surface arrangements on the painting. A subject existing in reality thus becomes superfluous. In 1889 the Groupe Synthétists held an exhibition in which Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, and Louis Anquetin took part. and CloisonnismGLOSSARYThe term is based on a technical process in enamelling, in which the liquid enamel is poured into small cells formed by thin metal bands; it describes a painting process in which adjacent paler and darker surfaces are enclosed and separated from each other by strong, dark contour lines. Particularly prevalent in Late Impressionism in the works of Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, the representatives of "synthetic" painting.. In the summer of 1888 he travelled to Pont-Aven and joined the small group of artists centred there around Paul Gauguin, whose style he adhered to, particularly in his paintings of Breton landscapes. With Maurice Denis, Sérusier was a founder and spokesman of the Nabis. Sérusier had a highly methodical approach to art; he expressed his theories in "ABC de la peinture" (1921).