La Pentecôte fresco: Maurice Denis’ Visual Remedy for a Fractured France

Presentation Type

Oral Presentation

Conference Date

Spring 4-17-2026

Abstract

My current research project, “La Pentecôte fresco: Maurice Denis’ Visual Remedy for a Fractured France,” is an art historical investigation of the Église du Saint-Esprit (Church of the Holy Spirit), located in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. In particular, my research is focused on the monumental work of Maurice Denis, La Pentecôte, created in 1934 and located in the central apse of the church. A member of the nineteenth-century Nabis movement and a participant in the avant-garde milieu of twentieth-century France, Maurice Denis set himself apart from his previous artistic output through his commission for the Church of the Holy Spirit. La Pentecôte fresco, painted in the contemporary art deco style, represents a return to figurative art within the œuvre of Maurice Denis. Accompanied by the church’s revivalist Byzantine architecture and Georges Rouault’s cubist Stations of the Cross, however, Denis’ artistic choice appears puzzling. The purpose of this paper is to disengage the meaning of this stylistic choice and ultimately argues that Denis’ handiwork encapsulates the mores, anxieties, anguish, and aspirations of both the individual artist and the inter-war society that produced it. My preoccupation with form, materiality, and iconography is directly influenced by, and works in tandem with socio-historical considerations, particularly those related to the inner workings of a shell-shocked, inter-war Parisian society. These considerations are supplemented by contemporary artistic and philosophical reflections primarily concerned with the twentieth-century tensions that existed between the modern and the traditional, between the innovative and the revivalistic, all rooted in a pivotal period of intellectual and ideological transformation within the French Catholic Church and its adherents.

Presenter

Corey Keller

Faculty Mentor

Darius Spieth

Award

3rd Place, LSU College of Art & Design

Academic Major

Art and Design

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