Le paravent rouge (avec Pégase)

This is a folding screen rather than a framed picture, a painted paravent meant to stand in a room and divide it. Redon made it between 1906 and 1908, in the last stretch of his career, when the man who had worked for 20 years almost entirely in black had turned to deep, glowing colour. Here he lets a field of red carry the whole object, and in the upper corner the winged horse Pegasus rises out of a patch of green marbling, half emerging and half dissolving. Redon liked Pegasus as an emblem of the imagination and of mixed natures, and on a screen he becomes decoration as much as myth. Helene Kroller-Muller, who built this museum's collection, was drawn to exactly this side of Redon, and the screen came to Otterlo as part of her gathering of his work.