Head within an Aureole c. 1894 - 1895

Odilon Redon created this pastel drawing of a ‘Head within an Aureole’ sometime during his career in France, as a late 19th and early 20th Century Symbolist artist. Redon was working in a period in which the established art institutions of the French academy were being challenged by avant-garde movements. He used non-naturalistic color and explored subjective and dreamlike imagery. We see in this artwork the traditional religious symbol of the aureole, however, the artist gives it his own twist. The head in the center looks more like a lost soul than a saint. Redon was working at a time when the institutional power of the church had waned and new interests in psychology and the occult had developed. The drawing is a product of this changing social attitude. To interpret this work more fully, it is necessary to research the artist’s biography, the critical reception of his art, and the cultural context of late 19th-century France. Artworks can only be fully understood when we consider their social and institutional histories.