Flowers in a Black Vase

Joris-Karl Huysmans, the great symbolist novelist and critic, called Odilon Redon "the prince of dreams" in an essay of 1885 (Huysmans 1885, 291-96), and he devoted many feverish pages to his friend's tenebrist "dream drawings" of the late 1870s and early 1880s in his cult novel, "A rebours." Indeed, Redon's early charcoal and black chalk drawings and his lithographs, which he collectively called his "noirs" (blacks), do little to prepare us for his conversion to color in the 1890s. Over the course of that decade, he began to drain literary and associative content from his work and to employ the interaction of color to produce a mysterious emotional resonance that he believed was more universal than what he achieved in his earlier "noirs." Increasingly, his work was filled with flowers, butterflies, leaves, and gently vibrating patterns with no clear relationship to the visual world.

Redon's most commercially successful works in color were his commissioned portraits and large series of floral still lifes, of which the Reves "Flowers in a Black Vase" is among the very finest. Rather than center the vase of flowers, as was conventional both in the genre and in Redon's particular practice of it, he positioned this large black vase on the very edge of the composition and allowed a profusion of yellow, white, and blue flowers to spill out of it, across a palpitating visual field of creamy beiges, pale grays, luminous whites, deep slate blues, and earthy greens. There are as many flowers and leaves outside the black vase as in it, suggesting that this particular arrangement of flowers is in an imaginary garden where others grow in abundance.

Redon employs all his skill to make us accept this floral still life as a work of the imagination rather than a representation of an actual vase of flowers in an actual place. The vase itself dissolves at the base, separating into its two artistic components - contours (black lines) and color (a deep, almost black blood-red) - refusing, thereby, to be read in conventional illusionistic terms. And Redon goes to greater pains to make sure that we cannot find any surface on which the vase can rest. Instead, we are returned again and again to the surface of the pastel itself, which becomes the true subject of the work.

There was a striking increase in the number of major painters who produced floral still lifes in the second half of the 19th century in contrast to the first half. One can scarcely imagine David or Ingres "stooping" to such depths, and even Delacroix, the greatest sensualist of 19th-century French painting, made only a handful of floral still lifes. Yet, in the second half of the century, virtually every great painter worked in the genre, and some - Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, and Gauguin - made important contributions to it. Why? The answer lies both in the increase in the horticultural industry - which brought more people into direct contact with a greater number of blooming plants - and in the artists' sense that they could gain access to nature's "palette" through the medium of flowers. Redon, like his contemporary Gauguin, was fascinated not only by the colors of flowers, but by their scents, and imagined that in making a floral still life such as "Black Vase" he brought all the sense into harmony.

"Impressionist Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection," page 141