Odilon Redon

Ambroise Vollard, Paris
Galerie de l'Élysée, Paris
E. & A. Silberman Galleries, New York & Paris
Mrs. Muriel Bultman Francis, New Orleans
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (a bequest from the above in 1964 and deaccessioned in 1996)
Private Collection, New York
Acquired from the above in 1997-98

New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, French Painting in the New Orleans Museum of Art, 1984, no. 29, illustrated in the catalogue
New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, Profile of a Connoisseur: The Collection of  Muriel Bultman Francis, 1985-86, no. 80, illustrated in the catalogue

John Caldwell, Handbook of the Collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, 1980, illustrated p. 66
Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint et dessiné, vol. I, Paris, 1992, no. 176, illustrated p. 79

Executed on thick buff colored wove paper, not laid down. The work is hinged to a mount at several places on verso. Artist pinholes at all four corners. The pigments are bright and the impasto is richly textured. Some evidence from a prior mounting is visible on the verso. A one-inch repaired horizontal tear runs in from the center of the left edge. Small nick and tiny crease at lower left corner as well as a few scuffs to the surface of the work, also at lower left corner. A few pindots of paint loss in the darkest red pigment in the body of the bird; one further pindot in the background color of the figure's torso, A mat stain runs around the perimeter of the work, otherwise fine. Overall this work is in very good condition.
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As long understood by the monarchs who would order their likenesses imprinted on coins and postage stamps, a head viewed in profile is elevated to an archetype that occupies the realm of the extraordinary. As the leading figure of the Symbolist movement, Redon made regular use of this motif: “Without clearly determinable gender, yet tending toward the female, with regular but hard features framed by a veil or hair and a collar, slightly inclined and with eyes either closed or gazing downward, it resists identification but conveys at the same time the impression of a superior spiritual being that is sufficient unto itself and may even feel sympathy for normal humanity” (D. Gamboni in As in a Dream, Odilon Redon (exhibition catalogue), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2007, pp. 126-27). In the present work the soft lines and washed pigments that describe Redon's figures serve to emphasize this very ethereal, transporting quality.

Odilon Redon celebrated the use of color in his later works, writing to his friend Picard: "I feel the coming of the hour where time doubles its price, the instant where the artist knows himself and no longer goes astray. Master of my means—in a small domain—I experience more than ever the pleasures which work procures...Colors contain a joy which relaxes me; besides, they sway me towards something different and new. Yet I could not speak to you of my projects; one doesn’t know the art of tomorrow" (quoted in John Rewald “Odilon Redon,” in Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York & The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1961-62, p. 39).

Redon proved to be an inspiration for many younger artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp and the Nabis. Richard Hobbs discusses the interest in Redon shown by the Nabis: “What the Nabis actually so admired in Redon was not only the technical quality of his works but also his ability to suggest the mysterious and the spiritual. Bonnard later summed this up succinctly: ‘What strikes me most in his work is the coming together of two almost opposite qualities: very pure plastic substance and very mysterious expression. Our whole generation is under his charm and benefits from his advice’” (Richard Hobbs, Odilon Redon, London, 1977, p. 84). After his revolutionary showing of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at the 1913 Armory Show (where 38 of Redon’s works were also exhibited), Marcel Duchamp was asked whether his art or that of his contemporaries was derived from the legacy of Cézanne. He replied, "I am sure that most of my friends would say so and I know that he [Cézanne] is a great man. Nevertheless, if I am to tell what my own point of departure has been, I should say that it was the art of Odilon Redon” (quoted in John Rewald, ibid., p. 44).