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拍品專文
Redon worked almost exclusively in black for the first twenty five years of his artistic life. He called these works his Noirs. Although he had experimented with paint in the 1860s he preferred techniques using black and white tones, affirming "Le noir est la couleur la plus essentielle.... Il faut respecter le noir. Rien ne le prostitue... Il est l'agent de l'esprit bien plus que la belle couleur de la palette ou du prisme". He also wrote of his Noirs, "my drawings inspire and do not define themselves. They determine nothing. They place us, just as music does, in an ambiguous world of the indeterminate..." (O. Redon, To myself, Notes on life and artist, New York, 1986).
The theme of a feminine profile detaching itself against a surreal and oneiric background is a recurring one in Redon's oeuvre. Regarding the present work the catalogue raisoné quotes "This motif of a feminine profile with long black indian hair, a fixed gaze, closed lips, would almost become monotonous by its repetition. But here the zoomorphic figure that springs suddenly in front of the woman as a hallucinatory vision, intensifies the fantastic composition and renews it, but in turn it poses an enigma. This figure, deformed by the vision and almost terrifying, is the head of an ass that can be recognised by its muffle, its snout, its long ears dangling at the sides of an exaggeratedly elongated skull. Should one see in this male ass that springs in a halo of light with such strange shapes, the double or the reflection of an ignorant soul that would be a prisoner of its senses and instincts as the Symbolism of that animal suggests; a symbolism that deems it to be an obscure, demonic, hesitant and stubborn creature? But it could also be a female ass. Then the symbolic interpretation changes as the female ass symbolises humility and peace. The meaning of the present work remains nonetheless troubling and difficult to grasp." (op. cit.).
The theme of a feminine profile detaching itself against a surreal and oneiric background is a recurring one in Redon's oeuvre. Regarding the present work the catalogue raisoné quotes "This motif of a feminine profile with long black indian hair, a fixed gaze, closed lips, would almost become monotonous by its repetition. But here the zoomorphic figure that springs suddenly in front of the woman as a hallucinatory vision, intensifies the fantastic composition and renews it, but in turn it poses an enigma. This figure, deformed by the vision and almost terrifying, is the head of an ass that can be recognised by its muffle, its snout, its long ears dangling at the sides of an exaggeratedly elongated skull. Should one see in this male ass that springs in a halo of light with such strange shapes, the double or the reflection of an ignorant soul that would be a prisoner of its senses and instincts as the Symbolism of that animal suggests; a symbolism that deems it to be an obscure, demonic, hesitant and stubborn creature? But it could also be a female ass. Then the symbolic interpretation changes as the female ass symbolises humility and peace. The meaning of the present work remains nonetheless troubling and difficult to grasp." (op. cit.).