Paul Sérusier was born in Paris. He was a French abstract artist and painter who was a pioneer of and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Cloisonnism and Synthetism. He studied at the Julian Academy, an alternative to the elite and conservative School of Fine Arts. As the Nabis’ leader he sought to paint what he saw as well as what he felt. Sérusier brought more evocative and conceptual elements into his painting, more so in his use of non-descriptive color and his dissolution of forms. Many of his paintings were meant to seamlessly fit in with their surroundings. This ensured that they were intellectually stimulating as much as they were aesthetically pleasing. He helped to bring in a new era in artistic innovation by advancing toward abstraction. Sérusier pushed painting away from representation and focused on evocation and sensation. Working closely with his friends, Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, he employed flattened forms and bold colors to illustrate his thoughts on the canvas. Thought has been dominant to his work and he placed it above everything else. For instance, if he perceived the sky to be yellow, he did not paint it as blue but as yellow the way he perceived it. From 1908 onwards, Sérusier’s influence was broadened when he became an instructor at the Ranson School, founded by Paul Ranson, his fellow Nabi. In this school, students were encouraged to embrace the evocative and expressive potentials of abstraction. Until World War II, The Ranson School was a very popular training institution for modernist painters. Today, framed Paul Sérusier art hang in many institutions around the world.