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Lot Essay
The disembodied human head is a key image, either auspicious or ominous, in Odilon Redon’s iconography. Divested of any bodily or other natural constraints, floating in space, the wide-eyed, pensive visage in Figure portant une tête ailée is the artist’s paean to the strength of the inner, idealistic, visionary self, as he had striven to achieve in his own life. “I have made an art according to myself,” Redon declared in Confessions of an Artist. “I have done it with eyes open to the marvels of the visible world” (trans. M. Jacob and J.L. Wasserman, To Myself, New York, 1986, p. 23).
One may suspect that this proud, determined winged head gazes upon and ponders the world with uncommon intelligence. The artist has equipped this wondrous head with a winged helmet, signifying the flight of thought and the imagination, to bear it along on its journey. Hermes, the messenger of the gods in antiquity, also the guardian deity of wayfarers, wore a winged headdress and sandals, which he lent to the hero Perseus, to aid him in beheading the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa.
As the curators of the 1994 exhibition Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams have noted, the present drawing “is among the most ambitious that Redon had made to date [1876]. Here, apparently for the first time, Redon explored the expressive potential of pastel, grafting a softly radiant skin of the medium onto its charcoal base” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 97). It was not until the mid-1890s that Redon began to work extensively in pastel. Until then, the artist patiently cultivated a small but dedicated clientele who delighted in collecting his magical, unprecedented, and idiosyncratic “noirs”—drawings rendered in richly layered charcoal, black chalk, and conté crayon, as well as lithographs in black and white.
"There is a certain style of drawing that the imagination has liberated from the embarrassing concern for real details in order that it might freely serve only as the representation of conceived things,” Redon wrote in À soi-même. “All my originality, then, consists in giving human life to unlikely creatures according to the laws of probability, while, as much as possible, putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible” (op. cit., 1986, p. 23).
Redon’s visions in the noirs are typically grotesque, even macabre and nightmarish. The heads, in their wisdom of the world, are almost always melancholy. The great halo of a golden sun that surrounds this rapt, winged thinker, however, generously graces this vernal landscape with beatific clarity. This seer, moreover, is not alone; he has attracted an admiring, protective, and youthful acolyte. “I feel myself proud and strong in my conscious vision,” Redon wrote on 2 June 1877. “External things, which are brightening unceasingly around my anxious person, today strengthen all my will. I feel myself a man, at last a man in his plenitude; in me life amplifies to excess and to its fullest. Sensitive to everything, everything speaks, and the word has never been revealed this clearly, so loudly, to my astonished eyes” (ibid., pp. 47-48).
One may suspect that this proud, determined winged head gazes upon and ponders the world with uncommon intelligence. The artist has equipped this wondrous head with a winged helmet, signifying the flight of thought and the imagination, to bear it along on its journey. Hermes, the messenger of the gods in antiquity, also the guardian deity of wayfarers, wore a winged headdress and sandals, which he lent to the hero Perseus, to aid him in beheading the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa.
As the curators of the 1994 exhibition Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams have noted, the present drawing “is among the most ambitious that Redon had made to date [1876]. Here, apparently for the first time, Redon explored the expressive potential of pastel, grafting a softly radiant skin of the medium onto its charcoal base” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 97). It was not until the mid-1890s that Redon began to work extensively in pastel. Until then, the artist patiently cultivated a small but dedicated clientele who delighted in collecting his magical, unprecedented, and idiosyncratic “noirs”—drawings rendered in richly layered charcoal, black chalk, and conté crayon, as well as lithographs in black and white.
"There is a certain style of drawing that the imagination has liberated from the embarrassing concern for real details in order that it might freely serve only as the representation of conceived things,” Redon wrote in À soi-même. “All my originality, then, consists in giving human life to unlikely creatures according to the laws of probability, while, as much as possible, putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible” (op. cit., 1986, p. 23).
Redon’s visions in the noirs are typically grotesque, even macabre and nightmarish. The heads, in their wisdom of the world, are almost always melancholy. The great halo of a golden sun that surrounds this rapt, winged thinker, however, generously graces this vernal landscape with beatific clarity. This seer, moreover, is not alone; he has attracted an admiring, protective, and youthful acolyte. “I feel myself proud and strong in my conscious vision,” Redon wrote on 2 June 1877. “External things, which are brightening unceasingly around my anxious person, today strengthen all my will. I feel myself a man, at last a man in his plenitude; in me life amplifies to excess and to its fullest. Sensitive to everything, everything speaks, and the word has never been revealed this clearly, so loudly, to my astonished eyes” (ibid., pp. 47-48).