Title: Figure portant une tête ailée (La chute d’lcare)
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel on paper laid down on board
Dimensions: 48.2 x 44.8 cm
Date Created: circa 1876
Description
The disembodied human head is a central motif in Odilon Redon’s iconography, an image both auspicious and ominous. In Figure portant une tête ailée, the wide-eyed, pensive visage floats free of bodily or natural constraints, suspended in void. It is the artist’s paean to the inner, idealistic, visionary self—a state he tirelessly sought. “I have made an art according to myself,” Redon declared in his Confessions of an Artist. “I have done it with eyes open to the marvels of the visible world.” This proud, determined winged head seems to gaze upon and ponder the world with uncommon intelligence. Redon equips it with a winged helmet, signifying the flight of thought and imagination, to bear it on its journey. In myth, Hermes, messenger of the gods and guardian of wayfarers, wore such a winged headdress, lending it to the hero Perseus to behead the Gorgon Medusa.
As noted by curators of the 1994 exhibition Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, this drawing “is among the most ambitious Redon had made to date [1876]. Here, apparently for the first time, he explored pastel’s expressive potential, grafting a softly radiant skin of the medium onto a charcoal base.” Not until the mid-1890s would Redon work extensively in pastel. Before then, he patiently cultivated a small, devoted clientele who delighted in his magical, unprecedented noirs—drawings in richly layered charcoal, black chalk, and conté crayon, alongside black-and-white lithographs.
“There is a certain style of drawing that the imagination has liberated from embarrassing concern for real details, so that it may serve only to represent conceived things,” Redon wrote. “All my originality consists in giving human life to unlikely creatures according to the laws of probability, while putting the logic of the visible at the service
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2986 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 910 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
