No fewer than five drawings and one painting by Odilon Redon in the Van Gogh Museum collection feature a woman’s profile: hardly surprising given that the artist made literally hundreds of them from the 1890s onwards. When Redon held his first one-man exhibition at the Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1894, he showed several of these recent drawings, including Youth (cat. 7) and Profile of a Woman against a Background of Black Poppies (cat. 10), alongside his earlier work. Like his previous noirs, they were done in charcoal, but the mood and execution could hardly be more different from those gloomy scenes in deep-black tones, in which monsters and nightmarish visions loom out of the darkness . Instead, Redon used his charcoal to produce serene female profiles, built up very subtly from small lines, thin layers and areas left open. The physiognomy of their high foreheads and refined facial features bears little resemblance to the low foreheads, pronounced noses and bestial characteristics of the figures that populate his black drawings and prints. This remarkable transition from dark to light and from monstrosity to serenity, which had commenced in the 1880s, has often been attributed to changes in Redon’s life to the more comfortable existence of a married man with a stable income, courtesy of a growing group of collectors.
Odilon Redon, Cactus Man, 1882. Charcoal on paper, 46.5 × 31.5 cm. The Ian Woodner Family Collection
For all his more mondaine lifestyle, Redon remained far removed from the real world with his profiles: rather than flesh-and-blood women, the artist created one idealized image after another. With their robes and headdresses and surrounded by flowers and foliage, his dream figures evoke an ethereal beauty. Where the drawings are characterized by subtle tonal gradations, Redon generally used a single, confident line in charcoal or even harder black chalk to make the profile stand out from the charcoal backgrounds. Depiction from the side isolates the woman’s gaze from that of the beholder, who is kept at even more of a distance by the parapet in the foreground of several versions. Redon seems to have been inspired in this respect by (early) Renaissance portraits in the Louvre by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Pisanello (c. 1395–1455) ( and ).
He found a female image in early-Italian art that fitted his artistic quest for a spiritual ideal. Where so many fin-de-siècle artists depicted the woman as the femme fatale whose sexuality brought the world to ruin, Redon remained true to her virginal antithesis. The same ideal of a divine Eros resonated elsewhere in the culture of the time too. Critics also sought cultural connections in contemporary literature and music. In 1894, for instance, Jean Lorrain (1855–1906) called Redon’s female profiles ‘daughters of Baudelaire’ because of their mysterious immobility, and he also compared them to Richard Wagner’s fairy-tale filles-fleurs, who tried to seduce Parsifal in the opera’s second act. But the mystery of these drawings is by no means confined to the women themselves. While the figures are often laid down in just a few refined lines, the background contains an abstract dream world, filled with arabesques and lighting effects.
As Redon worked in oil and pastels increasingly frequently in the late 1890s, he began to use colour to evoke the suggestion of other worlds in the backgrounds of his paintings and pastels. In Profile of a Pensive Woman (cat. 11) – one of the first works in colour after he had barely painted for decades – he was still making somewhat tentative use of a few ground tones to suggest a mountain landscape with a red-orange sun. That this was a first careful attempt is also apparent from the poor-quality cardboard he used as a support. Andries Bonger spotted the work in the summer of 1897 during a visit to the painter and was able to buy it for just 60 francs. Redon had provided the painting with a ‘small and modest’ gold frame. The Dutchman was delighted: he had been pressing the artist for some time for a recent work in colour and had now achieved his wish. He wrote that it brought him consolation in the long, gloomy Dutch winter: ‘I should have liked to talk to you straight away about the joy the little canvas has given me. It looks marvellous in its golden frame; one might think it several centuries old. Thank you so much for sending it; it gives my little collection a note of grave colour that fills me with pleasure.’
Redon drew the pastel Profile against a Tapestry (cat. 12) over a profile in black materials. He then used the pure pigments of the pastel chalk, bound to the paper solely by a tiny amount of oil and interacting with the chain lines of the laid paper, to create a woven tapestry full of lush, decorative forms in the background, where we find much more imagination and life than in the barely fleshed-out female figure itself. Did Redon really intend this contrast to express the inner world of his dreaming, pensive women and did he succeed in doing so, or did he actually reduce them to nothing more than a lovely, oneiric and decorative husk: an ornament in itself?
Cat. 8 in a reconstructed matting and its original frame by Boyer
In Concern for the Absolute (cat. 8) Redon traded organic motifs for a geometric background. He heightened the geometry by tipping the sheet and radically cropping the composition, which was initially drawn on the sheet straight. The artist had the drawing framed by his regular framer Boyer in a correspondingly angled mount: a remarkable invention that caused the work to leap out at the exhibitions in the Netherlands to which Bonger loaned it after acquiring the piece in 1901 . Several critics made a point of commenting on the drawing in their reviews of the shows at Kunstzaal Reckers in Rotterdam in 1907 and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1911. They freely admitted to being baffled by the work’s meaning, while being drawn equally firmly by its suggestive eloquence.
Later art historians, by contrast, have been willing to venture an interpretation. The meaning of the triangle behind the veiled woman with the dark-black eye, for instance, has been sought in occult philosophy, in which the form represents the Holy Trinity and ‘the mystic thought process that takes place behind closed eyes’. Reference has also been made to Redon’s admiration for Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) Melencolia I , a reproduction of which hung in his studio and combined all the wisdom and spirituality that Redon was seeking. In that work, Dürer depicts the pensive figure of Melancholy, whom he took to represent the artist himself, next to a geometric figure or octahedron. One could argue that the latter is echoed in Redon’s peculiar matting for the drawing. Redon’s artistic quest for ‘higher truths’ is expressed in the title: Concern for the Absolute. Although he sought in 1901 to play down this grandiose title by stating that titles ‘determine either too much or too little’, Bonger was very taken with it. He wrote: ‘Lovely title. How you must have lived by the mind and suffered through it before attaining this intensity of expression.’
Bonger was immensely impressed anyway by Redon’s female profiles. He acquired no fewer than ten of them over the years, seven in charcoal, two in pastels and one in oil paint. The first two were purchased in 1894, at and shortly after the exhibition at Durand-Ruel in Paris. In a first letter, which marked the beginning of a long and deep correspondence, he introduced himself to the artist as the purchaser of Youth and Profile of a Woman against a Background of Black Poppies. Redon also treated his profiles as a kind of litmus test for collectors: only after they had displayed sufficient appreciation and understanding of these works were they deemed worthy of acquiring the earlier noirs. But Bonger continued to buy profiles, even after becoming one of the most important collectors of Redon’s work: he acquired the final one, Spring, in 1904.
Even though some of these works may appear almost identical to us, Bonger found something new that moved him in each one, and they continued to fascinate him throughout the years. In a letter of December 1894 he told Redon how, tired after a long working day, he could look endlessly at his two profiles of women and how they were a source of consolation in his banal everyday life. Although ‘just a contour’, to him they were ‘an expression of such an intimate inner life […] that I could not name an equal’. He reiterated to the artist in 1896 what powerful feelings and daydreams Redon’s female profiles evoked in him: ‘Just now I was lost in reverie before your profile of a woman. How does this outline manage to convey an enveloping and unspeakable anxiety unless your hand has been guided by the most profound imagination! Fundamentally, I mean only this: (and I express myself so poorly, you will surely smile) when we are talking about art, there is no limit to its revelation.’ These rich experiences on the part of an empathetic collector were precisely what the artist himself had in mind with these works: ‘the repercussion of a human experience placed by permitted fantasy in a play of arabesques, where […] the action which will be derived in the mind of the spectator will incite him to fictions’. It is up to us as contemporary viewers to continue to lose ourselves in the ‘play of arabesques’ that the artist offers and to project our own stories and interpretations onto these still and elusive profiles.
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho
2022