Title: Fleurs
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: oil on panel
Dimensions: 61.2 x 37.7 cm
Description
By 1900, Odilon Redon had fully departed from the monochromatic “Noirs” that defined much of his career—those somber, enigmatic charcoals and lithographs. At the turn of the century, he publicly embraced color and its evocative potential, shifting toward more lyrical subjects. Redon banished the monsters, spiders, serpents, and skeletons of his earlier work, reveling instead in flowers, chariots, and mystical beings. As Klaus Berger noted, “The demons have retired.” This transition may have been encouraged by Redon finding kinship with the young Nabis artists, after years of working in isolation. To the Nabis, Redon was a revered figure whose art conjured dreams without resorting to allegory.
Flowers became the perfect vehicle for Redon to explore color’s suggestive power. He believed art arose from a fusion of observed reality and unconscious dream. Painting, he stated, must be “derived from reality… a pure means for expressing our feelings… while our ambition to creation remains in a dream state, a state of abstraction.” Fleurs embodies this union. While the vase and blossoms are meticulously rendered, the work is infused with a dreamlike mystery. The background is a hazy blend of reds and greens; the flowers seem to emit an orange mist. The table’s edge is indistinct, its green surface dappled with ethereal light from no discernible source. By erasing traces of everyday context, Redon places the still-life in a realm removed from reality—part abstract, part imaginary.
This is more than a carefully composed still-life; it is imbued with spirituality. As Redon expressed, his flowers existed “at the confluence of two rivers: that of representation and that of memory. This is the soil of art itself, the good earth of the real, harrowed and tilled by the spirit.”
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 1949 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 1006 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
