Winged Figure, work of youth (Homme ailé. Oeuvre de jeunesse)

There is a clear connection between Odilon Redon and Bourdelle in this drawing of a winged man, worried and frightened, venturing out into the darkness. At a time when symbolism was in its infancy, Redon and Bourdelle shared the same conception of the artist, lost in the terrestrial world, a fallen angel whose “giant wings [...] prevent him from walking”, to use Baudelaire's image of the accursed poet. Also inspired by Delacroix's lithographs for Goethe's Faust, this ink picture blending angelism and Satanism draws on a network of literary references specific to Dark Romanticism – those elaborated by Lamartine in 1838 in his poem The Fall of an Angel, and completed by Hugo in The End of Satan, a text published posthumously in 1886.

Lili Davenas