False Glory
Odilon Redon
1880–1890
- Medium
- Various charcoals, with incising, stumping, wiping, erasing, and subtractive brushwork, on pale-pink wove paper altered to a pale, golden tone
- Dimensions
- 49.9 × 33.1 cm (19 11/16 × 13 1/16 in.)
- Genre
- charcoal
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
wipingerasingdrawings (visual works)prints and drawingpaperstumpingincisingdrawing techniquespaper (fiber product)wove papercharcoal
About
This eerie drawing may have had familial ramifications. In the 1880s Redon’s younger brother, Gaston, won the coveted Prix de Rome in architecture, which may have rekindled a kind of sibling rivalry and increased the artist’s own feelings of inadequacy. Reiterating a motif that he had used before, Redon seems to have included a solar eclipse in one of the eyes of the laurel-wreathed bust’s masklike face.
