.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Redon began his series of flower paintings, both in oil and pastel, after 1900, when he was in his sixties. He was inclined to move away from the darkness of the troubling visions that had preoccupied him in his earlier paintings: noir drawings and lithographs. "The demons have retired," Klaus Berger observed (in Odilon Redon, New York, 1965, p. 88). Responding to the decorative theories of the young Nabi artists--Emile Bernard, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard--and to the widespread research in scientific color theory initiated by the neo-Impressionists, Redon began to approach his art from a new orientation, displaying a fascination in the purity of its means and sharing the Symbolist view of art for its own sake. Color became his chief focus, and subject matter now interested him mainly in terms of the possibilities it offered him for pursuing his new interest in chromatic experimentation. For these purposes, floral subjects were ideal, just as they had been earlier for Henri Fantin-Latour, the best known flower painter of his time.
In Bouquet de fleurs, Redon has reduced the background to a flat space, thus eliminating any sense of depth; further accentuated by the tightly cropped composition. The vase overflowing with flowers seems to float against a backdrop of fluctuating areas of iridescent color. Klaus Berger comments, "Here the artistic transformation no longer leads away from the subject, but straight to it; these are no longer 'ordinary' objects, however, but are the same magically enchanted. With the imagination of the artist, we see these flowers as if we had never perceived them before, they are here revealed to us in their reality and introduced to us in their essence as colors, as forms, as order, as organisms" (K. Berger, op. cit., p. 90).
In Bouquet de fleurs, Redon has reduced the background to a flat space, thus eliminating any sense of depth; further accentuated by the tightly cropped composition. The vase overflowing with flowers seems to float against a backdrop of fluctuating areas of iridescent color. Klaus Berger comments, "Here the artistic transformation no longer leads away from the subject, but straight to it; these are no longer 'ordinary' objects, however, but are the same magically enchanted. With the imagination of the artist, we see these flowers as if we had never perceived them before, they are here revealed to us in their reality and introduced to us in their essence as colors, as forms, as order, as organisms" (K. Berger, op. cit., p. 90).