Impressionist and Modern Art, Day

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Lot 122
  • 122

Odilon Redon

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Description

  • Odilon Redon
  • VASE DE FLEURS
  • signed Odilon Redon (lower left)
  • oil on canvas
  • 46 by 35.5cm., 18 1/8 by 14 in.

Provenance

Theo Van Gogh, Amsterdam
Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam
V. W. Van Gogh, Laren (Holland)
Wildenstein & Co., New York
Mrs. Richard Ernst, New York (1956) (sale: Sotheby's, New York
14th November 1984, lot 12)
Art Salon Takahata, Osaka (1991)

Exhibited

New York, Wildenstein & Co., Magic of Flowers in Painting, 1954, no. 56
(Possibly) Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum & Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Collectie Theo Van Gogh, 1960, no. 142 (catalogued as pastel)
Gifu, The Museum of Fine Arts (and travelling in Japan), Odilon Redon, rencontres et résonances, 1985-86, no. 120, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature

Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon, Phantasie und Farbe, Cologne, 1964, no. 250
Jean Cassou, Odilon Redon, Milan, 1972, p. 58, no. 1, illustrated
Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon, Catalogue Raisonné de l'œuvre peint et dessiné, Fleurs et paysages, Paris, 1996, vol. III, p. 46, no. 1401, illustrated

Catalogue Note

Painted circa 1900, this colourful and majestic still-life of flowers typifies Redon's mastery of the genre. With its dramatic almost blurred background and its juxtaposition of crimson-reds, orange-yellows and whites, the composition encapsulates the artist's rich and enduring vision of nature appropriated into a human context.

Gloria Groom writes of Redon's still-lifes of flowers: 'In choosing floral still-life imagery, Redon returned to a subject he had explored in the 1860s. Though all extraneous details of place and setting have been removed, these still-lifes suggest three-dimensional objects situated in actual space. Those Redon executed thirty years later appear to float beyond any suggestion of an interior, ''like flowers one sees (in) dreams.'' With these Redon took on his old acquaintance Henri Fantin-Latour...

Fantin's floral pieces are quintessential expressions of naturalism. Fantin's flowers struck Redon as 'dead'. Redon insisted on reference to nature, but through the filter of memory and imagination' (G. Groom, Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams, 1940-1916, New York, 1994, p. 320).