Paul Sérusier – The Talisman

This work has a special place in art history. Paul Sérusier made it while staying in Pont-Aven the artists’ colony in Brittany, in the late 1880s. The twenty-four-year-old was a well-educated artist and self-professed intellectual who had formed an attachment to the forty-year-old Paul Gauguin who had encouraged him in new, what we now call post-impressionist, ways to paint. His was an approach which eschewed the need for mimesis or perspective depth and which, although inspired by nature, denied the necessity of replicating it as if painting were merely the practice of an illusionist. It is fair to say that avant garde art took a new direction from this moment onwards.

Paul Sérusier, The Talisman, 1888, oil on wood, Muséee d’Orsay, Paris

This small work was made swiftly, and Sérusier’s mark-making, with some direction from Gauguin, was spontaneous and instinctive - the artist used mostly unmixed paints to give expression to forms rather than trying to carefully craft a realistic image. Later, the loose group of artists which became known as The Nabis, which included artists such as Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, those apostates from what had become by this point the impressionist orthodoxy, would admire this work reverently for its iconoclasm, its theoretical insight, its moment as an aesthetic watershed. It was another Nabis artist, Paul-Élie Ranson, who appended the Talisman title, even though its original one had been the more prosaic Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven. By gazing entrancedly at the work as a diminutive yet powerful totem of renunciation and experimental practice, the Nabis could remind themselves of their newfound artistic agenda. This painting’s sense of idiomatic departure signposted a pioneering path that would lead inexorably towards complete abstraction.

In fact, if you look at the painting without knowing its history or that it was made en plein air, and in a place beside a river and woods, you might not recognise that the mostly straight and narrow cobalt marks as tree trunks or that they are reflected in the water beside a green diagonal path, nor the chrome yellow as tree leaves. And in truth, this does not matter – we can respond to the painting as a pure abstract as much as an abstracted landscape. The identifiability or otherwise of elements within the work are like small signs but they are not essential for us to read to enjoy the imaginatively visual journey on which the painting takes us. What does ‘matter’ is the spirit and the energy that the juxtaposition of each of these colours, together with the collateral vermillion, white and veridian, communicates. In other words, the actual things in nature which prompted this particular arrangement of colours and shapes are incidental to the conviction of the ‘finished’ artwork. Their vibrant flatness speaks an entirely different language to the representational one used in western art since the renaissance and is also different from the fleeting light and movement language of the impressionists. The simplification of form here is radical and deliberately doesn’t map the real world but forces us to confront the material properties of colours and the essence of the scene conjured by their adjacencies and relative sizes, for their own sakes. It feels to me like the painting is grasping for something, but what we respond to isn’t any idea of the grasping’s success or achievement, but the process of grasping itself –and also the liberation the artist would have felt in the jettison of centuries of artistic training, practice, and tradition.

The surface detail of naturalistic painting seemed to the Nabis avant garde at the time to prioritise the appearance of things at the expense of something that was paradoxically both more cerebral and more instinctively understood – the underlying beauty and ‘pure’ form of a subject, its ontology. In this way, art, Sérusier believed, should transcend the simple creation of likenesses of things, people, or landscapes. Instead, it should aim for something altogether more mystical. The word Nabis translates as prophet or seer, and Sérusier lives up to this self-aggrandisement by trying to catch something sacred and eternal in his art.

There are echoes in such ideas of Baudelaire’s proto-symbolist thinking as exemplified in his influential poem Correspondences, published in his Les Fleurs du mal in 1857. The verse explores ‘une ténébreuse et profonde unité’ (a deep and tenebrous unity) in nature where perfumes, sounds and colours correspond with one another, an idea which can in turn be traced back to Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystical writings on synaesthesia in the century before, as a spiritual phenomenon rather than an oddly neurological one. Even earlier, Plato had divided what we call reality into the physical world of imperfect sensory perception and the eternal truths of absolute form. The former were only shadows of the latter. It’s not my intention here to delve too deeply into the roots or the meanings of symbolism in relation to late-nineteenth century art except to say that for Nabis artist’s such as Sérusier there existed a desire to describe with paint a more profound awareness of the world than is visible optically. This meant not mirroring or dissecting nature’s outward forms but responding to its underlying resonances which reverberated with a mysterious harmony. It must have seemed revolutionary, even if to us over-ambitious and grandiose, to reach for what he thought was timelessly transcendental, and which could communicate with the soul as much as with the senses.

However, as can be seen in The Talisman, such hidden rapports were more complex than repetitious patterning, and the artist felt free to draw on memory and even a primitive quasi-cabalism to elaborate the output. The energetic patches of chrome yellow which appear at centre top and bottom are not straightforward reflections of one another – a little ‘hole’ of blue sits in the upper one and a jagged cobalt green edged with a lighter emerald sits atop the lower one. The correspondences between the greens and yellow in the painting are fundamental – they are analogous colours and speak of cohesion and balance and also of growth. Meanwhile, the right-hand side of the painting is much darker. It may well symbolise something more ominous, a foreshadowing, but which remains integral and essential to the harmony of the whole.

The bold, blocky, pigment-defined shapes effectively zonalize the painting, without ever losing the ethereal connections that hover in the mind’s eye between them. In my reading, no one area dominates or is more symbolically important than another, although the cadmium orange and red seems to burn intensely. But to mix metaphors, this fieriness is like a contrapuntal fugal theme possessed of a forceful, pulsing, rhythm which animates the composition without dominating it. It might be simplistic of me, but my test of the ‘rightness’ of this picture is trying to imagine it with any of the shapes formed differently or in alternative colours and then judging whether or not it would still speak. In my view, The Talisman is bang on the mark as it stands. The painting serves as the artist’s inwardly sentient absorption and reaction to the outside world’s occurrences and as viewers, we are granted an insight into the flux and coalescence between the phenomenological aspects of the scene that he experienced.