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Lot Essay
Formerly in the collection of his friend and fellow Symbolist painter Emile Bernard, La grappe or Le marchand de ballons is a magnificent and only recently rediscovered drawing by Odilon Redon from his celebrated series of noirs. Executed in the 1870s and 1890s, Redon’s noirs were hauntingly mysterious, dark-toned drawings, all made in a mixed technique of charcoal, etching and lithography, that immediately established the artist as a leading pioneer of the unheimlich or the ‘uncanny’ and as one of the finest and most original imaginative minds of the nineteenth century. La grappe… was acquired from Emile Bernard by the writer, collector and dealer Louis-Charles Libaude in 1906 and then remained almost completely unseen in his collection until 2020 when it was rediscovered amongst around thirty other Redon works in a cellar of the collector’s former home.
Writing about Redon’s first exhibition of these now famous drawings in 1881, the novelist and critic J.-K. Huysmans wrote memorably that, here ‘nightmare [is] transported into art. Plunged into a macabre milieu, imagine somnambulist figures, twisted with fear and perhaps you will have an idea of the bizarre talent of this singular artist’ (J.-K. Huysmans quoted in S.F. Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon, Chicago, 1992, p. 102). For Redon, the stark, sombre tones evoked by the blackness of charcoal, combined with the airy lightness of the medium, provided the perfect means by which to articulate and render the imaginative stirrings of his unconscious mind.
Inspired by Goya’s ‘black’ paintings and los caprichos, as well as the grotesque caricatures of Daumier and French Symbolist writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé as well as Edgar Allen Poe, Redon was one of the first nineteenth-century artists to champion the ‘unreal’ as a powerful pictorial force. Some of the imagery in Redon’s art reflects the magical and ghoulish elements that permeate the folk tales of Médoc, the region where his family owned a country estate and he spent his youth. Such tales may well have informed the image of the lone balloon seller seen wandering across a stark, empty landscape in La grappe… Yet, in other respects, the strange metamorphosis taking place in this work, with its balloon-creatures coming to life in the encroaching darkness, is also one that marks a clear foreshadowing of one of the central themes of Redon’s best-known noirs – the floating eyeball, which attained its definitive incarnation in the artist’s unforgettable 1898 drawing, dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini.
Writing about Redon’s first exhibition of these now famous drawings in 1881, the novelist and critic J.-K. Huysmans wrote memorably that, here ‘nightmare [is] transported into art. Plunged into a macabre milieu, imagine somnambulist figures, twisted with fear and perhaps you will have an idea of the bizarre talent of this singular artist’ (J.-K. Huysmans quoted in S.F. Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon, Chicago, 1992, p. 102). For Redon, the stark, sombre tones evoked by the blackness of charcoal, combined with the airy lightness of the medium, provided the perfect means by which to articulate and render the imaginative stirrings of his unconscious mind.
Inspired by Goya’s ‘black’ paintings and los caprichos, as well as the grotesque caricatures of Daumier and French Symbolist writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé as well as Edgar Allen Poe, Redon was one of the first nineteenth-century artists to champion the ‘unreal’ as a powerful pictorial force. Some of the imagery in Redon’s art reflects the magical and ghoulish elements that permeate the folk tales of Médoc, the region where his family owned a country estate and he spent his youth. Such tales may well have informed the image of the lone balloon seller seen wandering across a stark, empty landscape in La grappe… Yet, in other respects, the strange metamorphosis taking place in this work, with its balloon-creatures coming to life in the encroaching darkness, is also one that marks a clear foreshadowing of one of the central themes of Redon’s best-known noirs – the floating eyeball, which attained its definitive incarnation in the artist’s unforgettable 1898 drawing, dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe, L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini.