Skip Navigation

Attitudes Are Easy and Chaste (Les Attitudes sont faciles et chastes)

Maurice Denis

European Art

Maurice Denis’s suite of twelve lithographs, Love, commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard, was inspired by the artist’s courtship of Marthe Meurier, whom he married in 1893. Each of the prints in the series is inscribed with a lyrical caption taken from the journals that Denis kept throughout his relationship.

Along with Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, his fellow Nabis painters (named after the Hebrew word for “messenger” or “prophet”), Denis rejected traditional perspective in favor of two-dimensional surface patterns and areas of pure color, used to convey emotional or spiritual meaning. Denis made the famous pronouncement that came to define twentieth-century modernism: “It must be remembered that any painting—before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.”

For these prints, he worked closely with the master printmaker Auguste Clot, providing him with detailed descriptions of the colors he imagined. This collaboration allowed them to develop the soft, delicate colors that create an otherworldly quality.
PORTFOLIO/SERIES Amour
MEDIUM Color lithograph on wove paper
  • Place Made: France
  • DATES 1892-1899
    DIMENSIONS Image: 15 1/2 x 11 in. (39.4 x 27.9 cm) Sheet: 20 7/8 x 16 in. (53 x 40.6 cm)  (show scale)
    SIGNATURE Signed, "Maurice Denis" lower left margin in pencil
    COLLECTIONS European Art
    ACCESSION NUMBER 38.442
    CREDIT LINE By exchange
    MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
    CAPTION Maurice Denis (French, 1870-1943). Attitudes Are Easy and Chaste (Les Attitudes sont faciles et chastes), 1892-1899. Color lithograph on wove paper, Image: 15 1/2 x 11 in. (39.4 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, By exchange, 38.442. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 38.442_PS6.jpg)
    EDITION Edition: 100
    IMAGE overall, 38.442_PS6.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2012
    "CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
    RIGHTS STATEMENT © artist or artist's estate
    Copyright for this work may be controlled by the artist, the artist's estate, or other rights holders. A more detailed analysis of its rights history may, however, place it in the public domain. The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
    RECORD COMPLETENESS
    Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.