Paul Sérusier: The Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven: The Talisman (Le Talisman), 1888, oil on wood…, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (By Paul Sérusier – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121893.
“A picture, before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered by colours in a certain order.” (Maurice Denis)
(c) 2018 JMN.
This is a perfect example of an artist making bold claims for all art which only really best apply to his own. Here he wants to reduce all painting the fundamental, colored, flat shapes. And I’d say his art suffers from this reductionism in that it ends up being too much just flat patches of color and not enough something else. Gauguin did more with flat color, but also much more with content, as did Van Gogh, but he added surface texture (and I believe was the first to do so).
Clyfford Still is an artist who probably would agree with Denis.
I’d say reducing painting to an arrangement of inert pigment on a flat surface is shooting oneself in both feet and the nads, and I’d counter that the real magic happens in something transcending the medium itself, even in his own art.