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Lot Essay
“My flowers [exist] at the confluence of two riverbanks: that of representation and that of memory.” — Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon’s art underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1890s, at which point he reintroduced color into his works on paper. Before this transition, Redon preferred melancholy greys and harsh blacks, capturing bizarre, uncanny and always monochromatic worlds in his charcoals and lithographs. While the artist shifted his attention to the vibrant colors of the natural world, he nevertheless retained his taste for the fantastical.
Redon was a lifelong individualist—though he exhibited with the Impressionists and Symbolists, he never claimed affiliation to any group, instead assimilating various influences as he developed his own visual language. One of his primary influences was Eugène Delacroix, whose Panier de fleurs paintings, exhibited at the Salon of 1849, would inspire Redon and his contemporaries—such as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet—to create their own flower paintings. While Redon drew on Delacroix’s vivid, richly detailed approach to flowers, his own pastels and oil paintings are characterized by a distinct, idiosyncratic style that straddled the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
“My most fertile technique,” Redon had explained, “and the one most necessary to my development, I have often said it, was to copy directly from the real while attentively reproducing objects from nature’s most ordinary, most special and most accidental characteristics. After trying to copy minutely a pebble, a blade of grass, a hand, a human profile or any other example of living or inorganic forms, I experience the onset of a mental excitement; at that point I need to create, to give myself over to representations of the imaginary” (quoted in “Confidences d’Artiste” in L’Art Moderne, vol. 14, no. 34, 25 August 1894, p. 269).
A striking example of this singular approach, the present work reveals both the careful observation and whimsical fantasy at the very heart of Redon’s practice. Though the forms of the flowers are carefully rendered, they are almost an unnaturally bright bouquet of bold, rich reds and sunny, saturated yellows, an impossibly colorful arrangement that prioritizes sensation over transcriptive realism. In its suspension of the bouquet in a field of pure color, meticulous attention to detail and intersection of Romantic, Symbolist and Impressionist influences, Le vase aux tritomas acutely illustrates the elements that render Redon’s bouquets so singular.
Odilon Redon’s art underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1890s, at which point he reintroduced color into his works on paper. Before this transition, Redon preferred melancholy greys and harsh blacks, capturing bizarre, uncanny and always monochromatic worlds in his charcoals and lithographs. While the artist shifted his attention to the vibrant colors of the natural world, he nevertheless retained his taste for the fantastical.
Redon was a lifelong individualist—though he exhibited with the Impressionists and Symbolists, he never claimed affiliation to any group, instead assimilating various influences as he developed his own visual language. One of his primary influences was Eugène Delacroix, whose Panier de fleurs paintings, exhibited at the Salon of 1849, would inspire Redon and his contemporaries—such as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet—to create their own flower paintings. While Redon drew on Delacroix’s vivid, richly detailed approach to flowers, his own pastels and oil paintings are characterized by a distinct, idiosyncratic style that straddled the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
“My most fertile technique,” Redon had explained, “and the one most necessary to my development, I have often said it, was to copy directly from the real while attentively reproducing objects from nature’s most ordinary, most special and most accidental characteristics. After trying to copy minutely a pebble, a blade of grass, a hand, a human profile or any other example of living or inorganic forms, I experience the onset of a mental excitement; at that point I need to create, to give myself over to representations of the imaginary” (quoted in “Confidences d’Artiste” in L’Art Moderne, vol. 14, no. 34, 25 August 1894, p. 269).
A striking example of this singular approach, the present work reveals both the careful observation and whimsical fantasy at the very heart of Redon’s practice. Though the forms of the flowers are carefully rendered, they are almost an unnaturally bright bouquet of bold, rich reds and sunny, saturated yellows, an impossibly colorful arrangement that prioritizes sensation over transcriptive realism. In its suspension of the bouquet in a field of pure color, meticulous attention to detail and intersection of Romantic, Symbolist and Impressionist influences, Le vase aux tritomas acutely illustrates the elements that render Redon’s bouquets so singular.