At the Window is one of the most unsettling works in the Van Gogh Museum’s collection. It is definitely among the ‘classic’ Redons, in so far as the dark charcoal drawing is firmly in keeping with the Frenchman’s reputation as the artist of monsters and nightmares. He made several drawings around 1878 of ‘thinkers’ wrestling with malign forces, be they interior or exterior, probably under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Translations of and allusions to Poe’s stories by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Joris-Karl Huysmans had turned the American horror writer into a cult figure by then. He was a hero of the literary and artistic circles that constituted French Symbolism, to whom his bizarre and grotesque tales represented the unprecedented riches that could be obtained by blending the worlds of reality and fantasy. This drawing seems to refer to the countless stories of aristocrats in their remote country houses who find themselves tormented by the darkest reaches of their subconscious minds.
Hallucinations and terrifying effects loom up beyond the window of a darkened interior. A man with wide-spaced eyes holding a skinny finger to his lips stares through the glass. His refined appearance might be a reference to Poe, who shared the hollow gaze, the collar-length hair with a receding hairline, the suit and even the moustache (). The face is not dissimilar to that of Redon either, which lends the drawing the possible dimension of a troubled self-portrait. All sorts of associations are evoked, meanwhile, by the enigmatic silencing gesture. The space itself is likewise open to multiple interpretations: is the sad-eyed figure standing outside looking in, sending a chill down the viewer’s spine, or is the pale face the reflection of someone on the inside, confronted by a frightening reflection of himself and his subconscious?
Edgar Allan Poe
Multiple layers and ambiguity of this kind were precisely what Redon was seeking to achieve in his noirs. The dark drawings he produced between around 1870 and 1890 showed him to be a master of suggestion, his clouds of powdered charcoal acting as an imaginative smokescreen. Redon wrote: ‘My drawings inspire and do not define themselves. They determine nothing. They place us just as music does in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.’ With a little imagination, a malevolent creature can be made out in the darkness outside the window along with the silhouette of a row of houses (). The lines are ambiguous, but whatever they are meant to be, the artist placed them here deliberately. Redon left it up the viewer to discover elements like this in his drawings. Whether or not they actually did so depended on their sensitivity ‘and the aptitude of his [the viewer’s] imagination to make things grow or shrink’.
For his part, Redon suggested an affinity with the prints of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) by identifying the drawing in his account book as ‘Dessin à la Goya “À la fenêtre”. The fascination with nightmares and the ability to blend visible reality with the fantastic in ominous scenes was indeed something that Redon shared with the Spanish artist as well as with Poe (). In his novel of ideas, À rebours, Huysmans describes his protagonist Des Esseintes as: ‘Overcome by an indefinable malaise at the sight of these drawings, the same sort of malaise he experienced when he looked at certain rather similar Proverbs by Goya; or read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, whose terrifying or hallucinating effects Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed into a different art’. In a single sentence, the novelist succeeds in capturing the terrifying, hallucinatory visions in Redon’s drawings, Goya’s prints and Poe’s stories. The drawing’s first owner, the Belgian lawyer and author Edmond Picard, described the Redons in his collection using the term ‘fantastique réel’, which he had come across in Baudelaire’s discussion of Goya’s etchings, copies of which Picard also owned. According to Baudelaire, the works in question balance on the ‘line of suture, the point of junction between the real and the fantastic [which] is impossible to grasp’. Picard also forged a synthesis of the tangible and the fantastic in his own work, prompting him to ask Redon in 1887 to illustrate an edition of his play Le Juré, in which a jury member is tormented by his conscience after a man is sentenced to death. In 1889 Redon sold to Picard At the Window or Drawing in the Manner of Goya as a ‘preparatory drawing’ for the lithographs to illustrate the text. Le Juré does not, however, include a related composition and while the drawing does fit the macabre and hallucinatory passages of Picard’s text, it dates from an earlier period ().
Francisco Goya, Disparate General, no. 9 from the series Proverbios, 1815–23. Etching and aquatint on paper, 24.5 × 35.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of the F.G. Waller-Fonds
Picard delivered a lecture surrounded by twelve charcoal drawings from his collection at Redon’s first survey exhibition in the Netherlands at the Haagsche Kunstkring in 1894. The novice collector Andries Bonger was among those present. He later told the newspaper the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant how Picard ‘could speak about all those strange things in a low voice, there, in that little room in which Redon’s art haunted the beholders in the gathering darkness.’ Bonger remembered the drawings and bought several of them when Picard’s collection came up for auction in Brussels ten years later. At the Window was sold under the title ‘Le penseur au vitrail’. With little competition from other collectors (Bonger expressed his indignation at the lack of interest in a letter to Redon), he was able to procure five important charcoal drawings to plug a gap in his by then impressive collection. Early noirs were hard to come by on the market, as Redon had shifted to working entirely in colour. Such drawings as were still in his possession he held on to for himself, while the rest had previously gone to collectors and dealers.
Although Bonger was more than satisfied with his purchases at the sale, he was less pleased with Picard’s choice of frames, going so far as to call them ‘hideous’, which is understandable given Bonger’s preference for Boyer’s understated frames. Picard had the frames made specially for his public presentation of Le Juré at Les XX in 1887, at which the audience was surrounded by his Redon noirs on easels. The dramatic frames were intended to heighten the desired theatrical effect. He asked the ‘artiste-encadreur’ Lembrée in Brussels to come up with designs that would create the ‘harmonie nécessaire’ between work and frame. Lembrée’s label can be seen on the back of the work. The frame is roughly decorated with beaten metal that, with a little imagination, suggests chains and window bars. The costly, artisanal surround provides the complex view with an additional window ().
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho
2022