Cezanne, You Painted The Wrong Rose !

"The rose is wrong.  I know what I'm doing." - Odilon Redon

"My flowers exist at the confluence of two riverbanks, that of representation and that of memory." 

"I refused to embark on the Impressionist boat because I found the ceiling too low.” -  from a letter to Paul Serusier.

 "As a child I sought out the shadows.  I remember taking a deep and unusual joy in hiding under the big curtains and in  the dark corners of the house."

"..the right .to dream, in indulge in the exuberant creativity of pure visual poetry, the right to depict forms never seen in nature, giving oneself over to the transports of fantastic mythology and symbolic story-telling."

Curious that an artist who created imaginary beings became famous thanks to a fictional character in an anti-realistic novel. Odilon Redon (1840-1916), the artist, did not share the revulsion toward the natural world of des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Husymans' novel Against Nature (1884).  But the book's sensational success magnified Redon's reputation, and it was Husymans introduced him to Symbolist  poet Stephane Mallarme.

After a misguided apprenticeship with the academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome, Odilon Redon studied with an eccentric, opium smoking lithographer named Rudolf Bresdin, who admonished the young man,  "The real artists ought not even to look at nature." 

At the same time Redon's new friend, botanist Amand Clavaud, introduced him to the underworld as seen through a microscope,  bacilii that Redon  later described as  "(the) terrifying world of the infinitely minute." - from A Soi-meme.  

Pairing the pastels of Redon with the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann is not so far-fetched as it may seem.  Bachmann the writer was provocative and so was Redon, who hoped to provoke in his viewers " a sort of diffuse but powerful attraction to the obscure world of the indeterminate and to set him thinking." - Redon to his publisher Andre Mellerio, 1898.

Images: by Odilon Redon
1.  Vase of Flowers - After Cezanne, 1898, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
2. decorative panel executed for a residence at Dommency, 1902, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. The Butterflies, 1910, Galerie Brame-lorenceau, Paris.
4. Old Man With Wings, c.1895, Louvre Museum, Paris.
5. Head of a woman, no date, Dallas Museum of Art.
6.Flowers in a vae, c. 1905, Carnegie Museum of art, Pittsburgh.
7. Le Printemps (Spring), no date, Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
8. The old tree in the field, no date, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.