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拍品專文
Please see important notice on page 144 concerning items from the Duke Collection
*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
Responding to the growing demand for his floral still lifes by collectors and their generally favorable acceptance by critics, Redon was devoting most of his time by 1904 to this subject. In the Salon d'Automne of that year, flower compositions accounted for almost a quarter of the 66 pictures he showed, and they predominated in his 1906 exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel. Gloria Groom has pointed out that "Redon's accelerated production of still-lifes coincided with a resurgence of interest in the genre prompted perhaps by the 1906 Salon d'Automne, in which the posthumous retrospectives for Cézanne and Gauguin included a number of each artist's still-lifes" (in Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 324).
Redon's efforts in this genre therefore tell of a deliberate marketing campaign, one aim of which was a desire for financial security. More importantly, however, the artist, now in his sixties, sought to keep abreast of current trends, and to broaden his reputation beyond his celebrated, idiosyncratic lithographs and drawings, which he called his noirs, with a crowning achievement in oil paint and color. Redon's floral subjects constituted a signal aspect of his late oeuvre that was well-integrated within his larger field of interests and moreover formed a bridge between his easel paintings and the large, exquisite decorations that he painted in his final decade.
The present painting is in fact the largest of the floral easel paintings documented in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonne (op. cit.); only the major decorations are larger. Indeed, considering its size, this picture was perhaps intended as part of a suite of decorative panels. The arrangement of flowers in the present composition is naturalistic; Redon painted specimens pruned from his garden in Bièvres and arranged in pots or vases, some of which were made by his friends working in the renascent French crafts movement. By eliminating table edges and other elements of an everyday context, Redon has placed his still-life in a space removed from nature, which is partly abstracted and imaginary. In a text written in May 1887, and later included in the selection of his writings published posthumously in 1922 as A Soi-Même (To Myself), Redon stated that painting must be derived "From reality, or in other words nature, which is a pure means for expressing our feelings and communicating them to others, out of which our ambition to create remains in a dream state, a state of abstraction" (in To Myself: Notes on Life, Art and Artists, New York, 1986, p. 153).
*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
Responding to the growing demand for his floral still lifes by collectors and their generally favorable acceptance by critics, Redon was devoting most of his time by 1904 to this subject. In the Salon d'Automne of that year, flower compositions accounted for almost a quarter of the 66 pictures he showed, and they predominated in his 1906 exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel. Gloria Groom has pointed out that "Redon's accelerated production of still-lifes coincided with a resurgence of interest in the genre prompted perhaps by the 1906 Salon d'Automne, in which the posthumous retrospectives for Cézanne and Gauguin included a number of each artist's still-lifes" (in Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 324).
Redon's efforts in this genre therefore tell of a deliberate marketing campaign, one aim of which was a desire for financial security. More importantly, however, the artist, now in his sixties, sought to keep abreast of current trends, and to broaden his reputation beyond his celebrated, idiosyncratic lithographs and drawings, which he called his noirs, with a crowning achievement in oil paint and color. Redon's floral subjects constituted a signal aspect of his late oeuvre that was well-integrated within his larger field of interests and moreover formed a bridge between his easel paintings and the large, exquisite decorations that he painted in his final decade.
The present painting is in fact the largest of the floral easel paintings documented in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonne (op. cit.); only the major decorations are larger. Indeed, considering its size, this picture was perhaps intended as part of a suite of decorative panels. The arrangement of flowers in the present composition is naturalistic; Redon painted specimens pruned from his garden in Bièvres and arranged in pots or vases, some of which were made by his friends working in the renascent French crafts movement. By eliminating table edges and other elements of an everyday context, Redon has placed his still-life in a space removed from nature, which is partly abstracted and imaginary. In a text written in May 1887, and later included in the selection of his writings published posthumously in 1922 as A Soi-Même (To Myself), Redon stated that painting must be derived "From reality, or in other words nature, which is a pure means for expressing our feelings and communicating them to others, out of which our ambition to create remains in a dream state, a state of abstraction" (in To Myself: Notes on Life, Art and Artists, New York, 1986, p. 153).