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Maurice Denis's famous saying of 1890, which became a great maxim of modern painters, is: `Remember that a picture " before being a warhorse, a nude or some anecdote " is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.' And so we see, in the self-portrait he painted a year or so before he wrote that, Denis, aged 18, as a plump surface adorned with an orderly little moustache, a keen student of contre-jour effects pausing to admire the sparkle he has just dotted onto the eyes. His hair, sleeked back, is parted in the middle, as befitted an artist who was to remain a middle-man throughout his career, a stabiliser, though veering to the right.
Stylistically, Denis followed Gauguin, tidying up after him. He became spokesman for the Nabis (`the prophets', among them Bonnard, Vuillard and Xavier Rousel), a Symbolist with a joie de vivre agenda, and then a churchy Classicist covering large flat surfaces with scenes of righteousness. Degas said of him: `he only ever makes bums that have never farted.' Denis's portrait of Degas in 1906, old, half-blind, but acerbic still, thank God, is one of the few vivid paintings in Maurice Denis (1870-1943), at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Another uncharacteristically lively painting is Visit to Cezanne, an oil sketch commemorating the afternoon Denis and Roussel spent beside a road outside Aix with Cezanne. Cezanne looks cordial but wary, obviously suspecting that Denis plans a souvenir picture in a pastiche Cezanne manner.
He knew of course that Denis had already composed a large Homage to Cezanne (not in the exhibition), in which the...