Lot Essay
The subject of woman and her relationship to nature was treated by Redon in several works between 1908 and 1912. The artist represented her against a tree as the embodiment of rebirth and against a shell as Venus, and by contrast as the figure of a captive, chained to a rock, all bearing the same pose.
Gloria Groom describes Redon's approach to this theme:
One of the earliest of his mythic series exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'automne is a panel, Rebirth (fig. 1), showing a woman with arms raised standing next to a [tree with arms raised] in a relatively naturalistic landscape, similar to that of the decorative panel Buddha in his Youth (fig. 2). Alluding to renaissance, purification, and new life, the title may have political connotations, referring to the campaign to renew French culture that figured importantly in the period's insistent nationalism. The work might also suggest Redon's own aesthetic "rebirth", a word he had used ten years earlier to invoke his future as a painter.
In Rebirth Redon pursued his earlier practice of associating figures with trees to signify humankind's origins in and continuing attachment to nature. Here he embellished on this theme by moving outside the realm of personal reference and quoting directly from a famous representation of Marine Venus (fig. 3), a painting by the Romantic artist Thodore Chasseriau (first shown at the Salon of 1839), which had recently been exhibited in Paris and was well known through the lithograph he had made after it, the Venus Anadyomene. The goddess of beauty arisen from the sea of chaos, Chasseriau's Venus provided Redon with a potent symbol of artistic creation as rebirth. Possibly he was aware that Chasseriau's image was based on a poem by the Greek poet Hesiod that describes a beautiful seascape surprised by dawn and "touched by the beautiful goddess." Thus Redon may have associated dawn and divine beauty to symbolize a new world, the renewal of self, and the artist's reverence for the procreative forces of nature. As we have seen him do throughout his career, he appropriated an image--in this case, a Venus with upraised arms--and nuanced its meaning by placing it in different contexts. For example, in a pastel known as The Captive (Wildenstein, no. 755; Location unknown), the goddess of nature and procreativity becomes a prisoner of her realm. As in rebirth, the woman leans against a tree, but here she is attached to it by a barely discernible chord. The figure's uplifted arms and erotic pose recall as well Michelangelo's Dying Slave (1513-1516; Muse du Louvre, Paris), an image that had inspired Redon's earlier drawing and painting Yeux clos, and that he always appreciated not only as a representation of the human condition, but also as symbolizing the creative process, of forming art out of chaos. (G. Gloom, "The Late Work; Part Two--The Artist as Mythmaker", in exh. cat., Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 341)
Our work is a reduced version of the Pushkin Museum work, painted without distemper. There is an increased focus on the female figure and the brightly colored flowers now become an integral part of the composition, comparable to Pandore (fig. 4) and Andromde (The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock).
Richard Bhler placed our version of Le Renouveau in his collection alongside another work entitled Femme dans les fleurs or La Desse des fleurs (Wildenstein, no. 722)
Marie-Christine Decroocq of the Wildenstein Institute will include this painting in the forthcoming fourth volume of the Redon catalogue
raisonn as no. 2607.
(fig. 1) Odilon Redon, Le Renouveau, circa 1908, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
(fig. 2) Odilon Redon, Buddha in his Youth, 1905-1910, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 3) Thodore Chasseriau, Venus Marine, 1838, Musee du Louvre, Paris
(fig. 4) Odilon Redon, Pandore, circa 1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gloria Groom describes Redon's approach to this theme:
One of the earliest of his mythic series exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'automne is a panel, Rebirth (fig. 1), showing a woman with arms raised standing next to a [tree with arms raised] in a relatively naturalistic landscape, similar to that of the decorative panel Buddha in his Youth (fig. 2). Alluding to renaissance, purification, and new life, the title may have political connotations, referring to the campaign to renew French culture that figured importantly in the period's insistent nationalism. The work might also suggest Redon's own aesthetic "rebirth", a word he had used ten years earlier to invoke his future as a painter.
In Rebirth Redon pursued his earlier practice of associating figures with trees to signify humankind's origins in and continuing attachment to nature. Here he embellished on this theme by moving outside the realm of personal reference and quoting directly from a famous representation of Marine Venus (fig. 3), a painting by the Romantic artist Thodore Chasseriau (first shown at the Salon of 1839), which had recently been exhibited in Paris and was well known through the lithograph he had made after it, the Venus Anadyomene. The goddess of beauty arisen from the sea of chaos, Chasseriau's Venus provided Redon with a potent symbol of artistic creation as rebirth. Possibly he was aware that Chasseriau's image was based on a poem by the Greek poet Hesiod that describes a beautiful seascape surprised by dawn and "touched by the beautiful goddess." Thus Redon may have associated dawn and divine beauty to symbolize a new world, the renewal of self, and the artist's reverence for the procreative forces of nature. As we have seen him do throughout his career, he appropriated an image--in this case, a Venus with upraised arms--and nuanced its meaning by placing it in different contexts. For example, in a pastel known as The Captive (Wildenstein, no. 755; Location unknown), the goddess of nature and procreativity becomes a prisoner of her realm. As in rebirth, the woman leans against a tree, but here she is attached to it by a barely discernible chord. The figure's uplifted arms and erotic pose recall as well Michelangelo's Dying Slave (1513-1516; Muse du Louvre, Paris), an image that had inspired Redon's earlier drawing and painting Yeux clos, and that he always appreciated not only as a representation of the human condition, but also as symbolizing the creative process, of forming art out of chaos. (G. Gloom, "The Late Work; Part Two--The Artist as Mythmaker", in exh. cat., Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 341)
Our work is a reduced version of the Pushkin Museum work, painted without distemper. There is an increased focus on the female figure and the brightly colored flowers now become an integral part of the composition, comparable to Pandore (fig. 4) and Andromde (The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock).
Richard Bhler placed our version of Le Renouveau in his collection alongside another work entitled Femme dans les fleurs or La Desse des fleurs (Wildenstein, no. 722)
Marie-Christine Decroocq of the Wildenstein Institute will include this painting in the forthcoming fourth volume of the Redon catalogue
raisonn as no. 2607.
(fig. 1) Odilon Redon, Le Renouveau, circa 1908, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
(fig. 2) Odilon Redon, Buddha in his Youth, 1905-1910, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
(fig. 3) Thodore Chasseriau, Venus Marine, 1838, Musee du Louvre, Paris
(fig. 4) Odilon Redon, Pandore, circa 1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York