Title: Fleurs dans un vase
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel on paper laid down on board
Dimensions: 60.3 x 48.2 cm
Date Created: circa 1905-1908
Description
At the turn of the 20th century, Odilon Redon shifted his artistic focus. Moving away from the somber fantasies of his early black lithographs and charcoal drawings, he embraced painting in oils and watercolor, and drawing in pastels, employing increasingly vivid and non-naturalistic color. Floral subjects entered his work, inspired by the still-lifes of Cézanne and van Gogh, and aligned with his chromatic explorations.
The pure, varied hues of flowers provided ideal inspiration. In Redon’s hands, the vibrant medium of pastel seemed to take on its own life, achieving dazzling, evanescent effects. He often depicted ordinary field flowers gathered from his garden, gradually evolving from relatively naturalistic representation toward a more decorative and fantastical vision. Early works suggest the solid presence of a table beneath a vase; later, the illusion of tangible space dissolves entirely, leaving bouquets adrift in an iridescent, imaginary atmosphere.
Redon believed art must stem “from reality, or nature—a pure means for expressing our feelings,” while remaining “in a dream state, a state of abstraction.” The surrealist André Masson admired these flower pastels for revealing “the endless possibilities of lyrical chromatics.” Redon, he noted, reinvented “color as metamorphosis,” collecting “bits of rainbows, dust from stars and suns,” using his botanical sensitivity to disclose mutations found in a light of wonder and mystery.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2216 x 2793 pixels
Image Size: 2.5 MB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
