Title: Fleurs dans un vase vert
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 27 x 22 cm
Date Created: circa 1885-1890
Description
Redon’s floral works, in oil and pastel, mark a luminous departure from the dark visions of his early noirs. As Klaus Berger observed, “All tensions relaxed… The demons have retired.” Influenced by the decorative theories of Maurice Denis and the Nabis, as well as by Signac’s color research, Redon turned his focus to the purity of artistic means, aligning with Mallarmé’s Symbolist ideal of “art for art’s sake.” Color became his primary exploration, and floral subjects offered an ideal field for this chromatic experimentation, much as they had for Fantin-Latour.
Encouraged by his botanist friend Armand Clavaud, Redon drew inspiration from the extensive garden at his country home in Bièvres, selecting and arranging blossoms he described as “fragile perfumed beings, exquisite prodigies of light.” These floral still-lifes served not only as salable works that helped settle a family debt but also as stepping stones to the great decorative projects of his final years. Berger noted they “constitute the red thread running through his late art.”
In some compositions, Redon placed the bouquet and vase within a flattened, ambiguous space, lending a dreamlike presence and evoking the decorative qualities he admired in Asian art. Japanese woodcuts, he found, helped him achieve a new freedom. The floral works of this period display a symphonic richness and harmonic purity previously unseen. They brought him critical exhibition success and secured his reputation as a master of color. He wrote to collector Andries Bonger: “If the art of an artist is the song of his life, a solemn or sad melody, I must have hit a happy note in color.”
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2630 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 584 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
