+ Expand

Artist or Maker: Odilon Redon (1840-1916)

+ Expand

Provenance: Marcel Kapferer, Paris (acquired directly from the artist).
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York.
Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz, Los Angeles; sale, Sotheby's, London, 14 October 1970, lot 13.
Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; sale, Christie's, New York, 15 November 1983, lot 28.
Doris Duke, New Jersey (acquired at the above sale).
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, New York.

+ Expand

Exhibited: Los Angeles, UCLA Art Gallery, Los Angeles Collectors, November-December 1953.
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz, April-May 1959, no. 49 (illustrated, titled Flowers).
Richmond, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, French Paintings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1973.

+ Expand

Literature: K. Berger, Odilon Redon, Phantasie und Farbe, Cologne, 1964, p. 201, no. 276.
World Collector's Annuary, vol. XXII, Delft, 1970, no. 4605.
P. Mitchell, European Flower Painters, London, 1973, p. 209 (illustrated).
R. Gibson, Flower Painting, Oxford, 1976, pp. 15-16, no. 46 (illustrated in color).
A. Wildenstein, Odilon Redon, catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1996, vol. III, p. 43, no. 1397 (illustrated).

+ Expand

Notes: Property from the Doris Duke Collection, sold to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

Please see important notice on page 144 concerning items from the Duke Collection

*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.

Responding to the growing demand for his floral still lifes by collectors and their generally favorable acceptance by critics, Redon was devoting most of his time by 1904 to this subject. In the Salon d'Automne of that year, flower compositions accounted for almost a quarter of the 66 pictures he showed, and they predominated in his 1906 exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel. Gloria Groom has pointed out that "Redon's accelerated production of still-lifes coincided with a resurgence of interest in the genre prompted perhaps by the 1906 Salon d'Automne, in which the posthumous retrospectives for Cézanne and Gauguin included a number of each artist's still-lifes" (in Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 324).

Redon's efforts in this genre therefore tell of a deliberate marketing campaign, one aim of which was a desire for financial security. More importantly, however, the artist, now in his sixties, sought to keep abreast of current trends, and to broaden his reputation beyond his celebrated, idiosyncratic lithographs and drawings, which he called his noirs, with a crowning achievement in oil paint and color. Redon's floral subjects constituted a signal aspect of his late oeuvre that was well-integrated within his larger field of interests and moreover formed a bridge between his easel paintings and the large, exquisite decorations that he painted in his final decade.

The present painting is in fact the largest of the floral easel paintings documented in the Wildenstein catalogue raisonne (op. cit.); only the major decorations are larger. Indeed, considering its size, this picture was perhaps intended as part of a suite of decorative panels. The arrangement of flowers in the present composition is naturalistic; Redon painted specimens pruned from his garden in Bièvres and arranged in pots or vases, some of which were made by his friends working in the renascent French crafts movement. By eliminating table edges and other elements of an everyday context, Redon has placed his still-life in a space removed from nature, which is partly abstracted and imaginary. In a text written in May 1887, and later included in the selection of his writings published posthumously in 1922 as A Soi-Même (To Myself), Redon stated that painting must be derived "From reality, or in other words nature, which is a pure means for expressing our feelings and communicating them to others, out of which our ambition to create remains in a dream state, a state of abstraction" (in To Myself: Notes on Life, Art and Artists, New York, 1986, p. 153).

Tax exempt
Seller explicitly reserves all trademark and trade name rights and rights of privacy and publicity in the name and image of Doris Duke. No buyer of any property in this sale will acquire any right to use the Doris Duke name or image. Seller further explicitly reserves all copyright rights in designs or other copyrightable works included in the property offered for sale. No buyer of any property in the sale will acquire the rights to reproduce, distribute copies of, or prepare derivative works of such designs or copyrightable works.