Anemones and Tulips

Anemones and Tulips from around 1902, at the Brooklyn Museum, belongs to Odilon Redon's decisive turn toward floral subjects in the last two decades of his career — a turn that surprised contemporaries who had defined him as the creator of disturbing lithographic dreamscapes. Redon began painting flowers intensively after 1895, finding in their color and organic form a positive, luminous alternative to the darkness of his charcoal and lithograph work. The Brooklyn Museum's collection of French Post-Impressionism holds this as an example of the late Redon who was as influential on twentieth-century color painting as Cézanne and Gauguin.

Redon's floral paintings are built from saturated, radiant color applied in a way that makes individual flowers glow as if internally lit. The background is typically atmospheric and undifferentiated, allowing the flowers to emerge into an unspecific, dreamlike space.