ODILON REDON 1840 Bordeaux – Paris 1916

LE CLAIRE KUNST SEIT 1982

Pensées dans un vase

Pastel on paper. Signed lower left: Odilon Redon. 623 x 482 mm

PROVENANCE: Andries Bonger (1861-1936; acquired directly from the artist for 200 francs in 1905) – F.W.M. Bonger, Baroness van der Borch van Verwolde – Jacques Seligmann & Co, New York, c.1956 – Wildenstein Gallery, Paris & New York – Marjorie Knight Wooley, New York (since 1963) – Galerie Schmit, Paris – Private collection, Japan

EXHIBITIONS: Odilon Redon, Cleveland, Minneapolis, New York 1951-2, no. 6, p. 16, repr. (Vase de fleurs- Pensées) – French Painting of the Last Half of the XIXth Century, Raleigh, The North Carolina Museum of Art, 1956, repr. (Vase de fleurs-Pensées) – Maîtres français, XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris, Galerie Schmit, 1986, no. 50

LITERATURE: Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon. Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre paint et dessiné, Paris 1996, III, no. 1480, repr. p. 4 (in colour) and p. 90. – Odilon and Emile Bernard. Masterpieces from the Andries Bonger Collection, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Zwolle 2009, cat. no. 144, p. 128, repr.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux in 1840. A sickly child, he was brought up by an uncle at Peyrelebade in the Médoc, where his father owned a vineyard. Memories – good and bad – saw him return to the estate on a regular basis in adulthood and provided him with an endless source of creative stimulus.

Redon seriously considered entering a career as an architect and a writer despite his overriding interest in painting. His friendship with Mallarmé and his study of scientific writings deeply influenced his pictorial output. He studied painting under Stanislas Gorin in Bordeaux and briefly, although unsuccessfully, under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. He learned printing techniques from Rudolphe Bresdin. He served in the Franco-Prussian war and after leaving the army decided to concentrate on painting and drawing. He settled in Paris and took an active part in the artistic and intellectual life of the city. He began work on what was to be a large body of highly original charcoal drawings which he called his Noirs. These drawings conjure up a strange world of subjective, melancholic fantasy. Published as lithographs, they reached a wider public and were to see Redon classified as a Symbolist – a label he deprecated.1

Colour did not become dominant in Redon’s work until the late 1890s. By 1900 he had abandoned the series of Noirs in favour of floral motifs. And these were to be his central preoccupation. Although the decorative lyricism of these late works would appear to contrast sharply with the melancholic character of his earlier, monochromatic work, his handling of subjects drawn from nature remained fundamentally unchanged. Both in the Noirs and in his still-lifes natural subjects mutate into

1 Richard Hobbs, Odilon Redon, in Jane Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 1996, XXVI, p. 71 f.

ELBCHAUSSEE 386 ∙ 22609 HAMBURG ∙ TELEFON: +49 (0)40 881 06 46 ∙ FAX: +49 (0)40 880 46 12 [email protected] ∙ WWW.LECLAIRE-KUNST.DE HYPOVEREINSBANK HAMBURG ∙ BLZ: 200 300 00 ∙ KTO: 222 5464 SWIFT (BIC): HYVEDEMM300 ∙ IBAN: DE88 200 3000 0000 222 5464 STEUERNUMMER 42/040/02717 ∙ UST.-ID.-NR.: DE 118 141 308 LE CLAIRE KUNST SEIT 1982 dreamlike images. His images of flowers evoke an ethereal symbolism. The ephemeral quality of flowers and their botanical workings fascinated him.

Redon had originally taken up still-life in the early 1860s. By contrast, his later works appear to float as in a dream, beyond any suggestion of location and surroundings. As in the present work, the frail flower arrangements are frequently placed in simple, heavy stoneware or glazed ceramic vases.2 Their setting is abstract. A vast area of untouched paper serves as a background. The heavy stoneware vase is all that keeps the flowers from floating freely in space. For Redon, flowers acted as a conduit to the imagination and opened a way into the world of dreams and the inner self. He noted: The suggestion of a flower, one that is almost animal – that’s me.3 And in 1912 he wrote: It is possible that, halfway towards the realization [of an idea], a sudden jog to my memory sometimes forced me to stop [where I was, only to] find [the work] formed and organized according to my desire: flowers 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.4

Redon used the distinctive vase decoré depicted in the present pastel – a blue-and-brown glazed pitcher – as a recurrent motif in his images of bouquets and in his still-lifes.5 The pansies, spring flowers, mirror the colour of the vase. The flowers have a multifaceted symbolic meaning. Presaging spring, they stand for youth, hope, love and humility. In Christian belief the five petals symbolize the wounds of Christ and the three colours the Trinity. The pansy derives its name from the French pensée and is a traditional symbol of liberal and humanist ideas. Depicting the elusive qualities of flowers in the fragile medium of pastel, Redon created vibrating fusions of dream and reality striking in their originality.

The present pastel was originally owned by Andries Bonger, a leading Dutch collector of Redon’s work [fig. 1]. Bonger came to Paris as a young man in 1879 to work as junior clerk in a trading company. Through his friendship with Theo van Gogh, his later brother-in-law, he gained important experience in the contemporary art world.6 Émile Bernard introduced him to Redon in 1890.7 A short time later Bonger bought his first work by Redon and quickly became a close friend and one of his chief patrons. The two men corresponded regularly. Bonger had acquired a considerable fortune in the insurance business. He collected strategically, concentrating on only a few artists. He was the first collector in the Netherlands to focus on the work of Émile Bernard and Odilon Redon. In his capacity as an expert, he was invited to give the opening lecture at the Redon exhibition in Amster- dam in 1909: […] Soon you will see opening up before you a hitherto unseen world of dreamlike images that will never leave you and, after repeated viewing, will become integral to you. – For, let me tell you now: Redon’s art is essentially human.8

2 Redon owned a collection of pottery made by his friend, the Russian-born potter Marie Botkin. See Gloria Groom, The late Work, in Odilon Redon. Prince of dreams 1840-1916, exhib. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the Royal Academy, London 1994, p.320. 3 As quoted in Roseline Bacou, Odilon Redon. Pastels, London 1987, p. 17. 4 Gloria Groom, op. cit., 1994, p. 320 and p. 422. 5 See Wildenstein 1470-1481 (pastels) and 1381-82 (Nature morte au pichet bleu) 6 Fred Leeman and Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, Odilon Redon and Emile Bernard. Masterpieces from the Andries Bonger collection, exhib. cat., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Zwolle, 2009, p. 11 ff. 7 Marie-Pierre Salé, Redon et ses collectionneurs, in Odilon Redon, Prince du Rêve 1840-1916, exhib. cat., Paris, Grand Palais, Galeries nationales and Montpellier, Musée Fabre, 2011, p. 45 f. 8 Fred Leeman and Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, op. cit., p. 74.

Fig.1: Interior of Andries Bonger’s home at 56 Stadthouderskade, Amsterdam, 1904. Bonger Archive, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.