Maurice Denis

Maurice Denis shaped modern painting by insisting on its fundamental nature: a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a deliberate order. Born in Granville in 1870, he studied in Paris and in 1890 helped found Les Nabis, a group of young painters committed to new forms of expression. His famous essay that year crystallized ideas about the picture plane that would become foundational to Cubism, Fauvism, and abstraction.