MAURICE DENIS

The work is a devotional book attributed to the Flemish monk Thomas à Kempis, written in the early 15th century and a bestseller up until the 19th, when it was one of the most widely read books. Maurice Denis discovered it when he was a teenager and had always wanted to illustrate it. After a dozen years of work, he finally found a publisher in the person of Ambroise Vollard. The book, illustrated with woodcuts based on Denis’ drawings, was published in 1903. Almost seventy woodblock artists worked on its creation.

The exhibition presents a selection of the some 246 sheets recently acquired by the Musée d’Orsay. It invites visitors to immerse themselves in the work’s genesis and try to understand the artist’s thought processes from initial idea to final image. A tireless experimenter, Denis explored a variety of techniques, including pencil, ink, wash and tracing, to express the religious precepts in drawing. These drawings will be exhibited alongside paintings by Denis and various other of his projects on Christian and spiritual subjects; they will be presented in comparison with pages from the final book, of which the Musée d’Orsay recently acquired an unbound copy, the form in which it could be bought when it was first published. This arrangement will enable us to integrate the drawings into the overall publishing project that brought the Nabi artist and avant-garde publisher together.