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Lot Essay
Redon began his series of flower paintings, both in oil and pastel, after 1900, when he was in his sixties. He seemed in the mood to move away from the darkness of the troubling visions that had preoccupied him in his earlier paintings, "noir" drawings and lithographs. "The demons have retired" (K. Berger, op. cit., p. 88). Responding to the decorative theories of the young Nabi artists, who looked up to him as a forerunner and godfather to their movement, and to the widespread experimentation in color theory initiated by the Neo-Impressionists, Redon began to approach his art in terms of the purity of its means. Color became his chief focus; subject matter now interested him mainly for the possibilities it offered him for exploring color. For these purposes floral subjects were ideal, "they constitute the red thread running through his late art" (ibid.). In these pictures Redon objectively describes the species of flowers and the shape of the vessel that holds them. Here he has assembled begonias and geraniums in a terra cotta pot.
In other works of this period Redon establishes a definite sense of space by means of shadows and the hint of a horizontal tabletop. The present painting looks forward to the next phase of flower paintings, in which the vase appears to float in a vague, flattened space. The flowers themselves, which Redon called "admirable prodigies of light" (quoted in M. Wilson, Nature and Imagination: The Work of Odilon Redon, London, 1978, p. 76), would soon be rendered in an increasingly decorative and fantastical manner, showing the influence of Asian art. In his final phase, from about 1908 to his death in 1916, Redon created a synthesis of both these naturalistic and decorative tendencies, painting recognizable varieties of flowers plucked from the garden of the house he had recently inherited in Bièvres, outside Paris.
In other works of this period Redon establishes a definite sense of space by means of shadows and the hint of a horizontal tabletop. The present painting looks forward to the next phase of flower paintings, in which the vase appears to float in a vague, flattened space. The flowers themselves, which Redon called "admirable prodigies of light" (quoted in M. Wilson, Nature and Imagination: The Work of Odilon Redon, London, 1978, p. 76), would soon be rendered in an increasingly decorative and fantastical manner, showing the influence of Asian art. In his final phase, from about 1908 to his death in 1916, Redon created a synthesis of both these naturalistic and decorative tendencies, painting recognizable varieties of flowers plucked from the garden of the house he had recently inherited in Bièvres, outside Paris.