Odilon Redon French, 1840-1916

Baron Robert de Domecy, Château de Domecy, Sermizelles (acquired from the artist); thence by descent
Galerie Hopkins-Thomas, Paris
Private Collection

Paris, Hôtel Georges V, Premier Salon du dessin de collection, 1991

Rosaline Bacou, Odilon Redon, Geneva, 1956, vol. II, p. 43, no. 14
Douglas Druick ed., Odilon Redon, Prince of Dreams 1840-1916, New York, 1994, p. 269, illustrated
Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon, catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint et dessiné, vol. II, Mythes et legendes, Paris, 1994,  p. 172, no. 1084, illustrated

This condition report has been provided by Jane McAusland FIIC, Conservator and Restorer of Art on Paper, Nether Hall Barn, Old Newton, Nr Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14.C O N D I T I O N R E P O R T SOTHEBY'S - SYMBOLISM AND THE POETIC VISION - 14 NOVEMBER 2007 Lot 257 Odilon Redon French, 1840-1916 L'ARAIGNÉE Charcoal and black chalk on paper 50 x 35 cm Support This drawing is on a sheet of thick wove buff paper. On the verso towards the left centre there are a small group of paper repairs, either thinned spots or worm-holes. The sheet is strong and in a good clean condition. Artist pinholes show at all corners. The sheet is a little cracked at the foot approximately 1.00 cm from the edge. At present it is hinged into an overlay mount. Medium The surface is also in a good condition. There is a small amount of loss along the top edge and also a little on the left side where an old mount or frame has rubbed it. There is a tiny loss on the lower part of the left edge. Note: This work was viewed outside studio conditions. JANE McAUSLAND London office: Flat 3, 41 Lexington Street, Soho, London W1F 9AJ Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Jane McAusland Limited trading as Jane McAusland FIIC
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THREE WORKS BY ODILON REDON (lots 257-259)

Odilon Redon once noted in his diary: 'My originality consists of bringing to life improbable creatures according to the laws of  probability, by putting, as much as possible, the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.' (Odilon Redon, A soi-même, p. 28).

Until he was almost fifty years old, Redon worked virtually exclusively in monochrome, the black and white drawings that he produced during these years being his so-called noirs ('black things', Redon's own affectionate term for his charcoal drawings and lithographs). These intensely worked-through products of his imagination were intended to unsettle by exploring the dark world of the indeterminate and the equivocal. With his mysterious evocations of a dreamworld, Redon was one of the most important forerunners of modernism, and above all Surrealism. 

Nicknamed 'Prince of mysterious dreams' by his friend, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, Redon belonged to the generation of the Impressionists. The years of his youth saw a two-fold development in the French art-world, the triumph and perpetuation of conventional art at the official annual Salons, and the emergence of modern art, in the form of Realism, Impressionism and Symbolism, which asserted artistic freedom of expression. Often misunderstood during his lifetime, having gained notoriety through Huysmans's seminal novel A Rebours (Against the Grain), Redon was often assimilated to the fictional persona of Des Esseintes, the decadent protagonist of Huysmans's novel. In the eyes of some conservative critics Redon's noirs came to represent the 'sordid product of a perverted and deranged mind, the pitiable scratchings of a lunatic fit only for the asylum' (quoted in Ted Gott, The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon, p. 69).

Although Redon's art was profoundly idiosyncratic, his significance for the emergence of modern art should not be underestimated. Admired by contemporary writers and painters, such as Gauguin, Bernard, Matisse, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Verhaeren and Gide, he was also a mentor and inspiration to the Nabis (see Vuillard's portrait of Redon on the facing page) and the Surrealists.

Redon was preoccupied with expressing a subjective, non rational interpretation of reality, founding his work on the exploration of an 'invisible' world, which would evoke in the spectator a sense of mystery. His suggestive art, based on a conjunction of real and unreal motifs, was not only designed to have a visual impact on the viewer, but to engage his mind, triggering off meditative states or flights of the imagination. Redon wanted his noirs to be like music, something uncircumscribed that everyone can feel and understand in his own way, a theme upon which the viewer would embroider his own dream.

Keenly aware of the importance of being of his time, he embraced the present and incorporated issues of contemporary significance in his work. Interested in current theories of the unconscious and scientific discoveries, Redon's charcoals responded to developments in science and visualised some of the wonder as well as anxiety that attended these advances and discoveries.

He was particularly inspired by his friend, the botanist Armand Clavaud (1828-90), a specialist in algae, who introduced Redon to Darwin's evolutionary theories and had shown him the shimmering world of the infinititely small through his microscope, an instrument not then widely in use. Redon subsequently became fascinated with Pasteur and his microbial world, where 'in a single drop of water there arises the spectacle of giants and a gripping horror and a frightful, predatory nature'.  (A soi-même).

The view through Clavaud's microscope thus rendered visible to Redon the contradiction between two worlds: the authentic but invisible world of science and visible reality. This tension became the essential point of departure for his noirs.

Redon was also indebted to Clavaud for introducing him to contemporary literature and poetry, notably to the literary works of Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's concepts of 'imagination' and 'transposition' subsequently became the key philosophy behind Redon's work and own writings on art.

Other scientific influences on Redon's oeuvre included the new directions in medicine and notably the early stages of psychiatry and dream research. The relationship between the dream state and madness was a key theme of nineteenth century, and specifically French thought. Dreams and associated phenomena such as somnambulism, ecstasy and hallucinations as well as the question of whether dreams and daydreams might be a source of creativity, preoccupied artists, writers, philosophers and psychiatrists. Baudelaire's maxim 'Natural things exist only a little; reality lies only in dreams' (Paradis artificiels) was representative of the stance of many Symbolist painters, including Redon, and found expression in his charcoal drawings and the series of lithographs entitled Dans le rêve (In a dream), 1879; À Edgar Poe, 1881; and Les origines (The Origins), 1883.

Redon's works often explore dualities, such as good-evil / terrifying-comical. Works such as Araignée (lot 257) or Dans la boue (lot 258) combine the horrific with the comical and the facial expression of these creatures contains a vulnerability which is very touching. By combining unlike elements and superimposing unlike objects such as animals and plants with human heads, Redon created images both fantastic and grotesque, macabre and enigmatic, in which time and space are indeterminable.

Executed in 1902, the present work was a commission by Baron Robert de Domecy and relates to three drawings of spiders by Redon from the early 1880s (Wildenstein, p. 172, nos. 1081-83). The Laughing Spider, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, was widely circulated as a lithograph and became one of  Redon's most famous images. A depiction of a crying spider was acquired by Henri Matisse and sold at Sotheby's New York in 1985. Its face relates most closely to that of the spider in the present work. Another drawing of a crying spider is in a private collection in the Netherlands.

Joris-Karl Huysmans refers to the series in his novel A Rebours (Against the Grain) of 1884 when he describes a 'terrifying spider, its human face lodged in the middle of its body' decorating the bedroom of the novel's protagonist, Des Esseintes.