« Sans adieu ». Andries Bonger – Odilon Redon, correspondance 1894 – 1916

Critical edition of a major correspondence (1894-1914) between Odilon Redon and one of his foremost collectors, the Dutch insurance broker Andries Bonger. The latter’s important collection of works by Redon and Emile Bernard is now in the Collectie Nederland, mostly in the Van Gogh Museum.
The importance of this correspondence is exceptional, not only due to its scope, but also because of the formal and intellectual quality of the exchange, because its documents the life, art and reflections of one of the major French artists of the turn of the century and of a foremost collector of modern art in the Netherlands, as well as the artistic, cultural and social life of which they were a part. The aesthetic, intellectual and moral affinity between the two men, the many roles assumed by Bonger in relation to Redon—agent, critic, and to some extent historian, as well as collector and patron—also make this correspondence a milestone in the history of artist-patron relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, since Redon’s precociously Symbolist art met at first with strong resistance (except for small literary circles) in France, but found a crucial support in the burgeoning international network of “independent” art in Belgium and the Netherlands, before it extended to Germany, Switzerland and the United States, these letters also illuminate the geography of artistic exchange and circulation within Europe at this critical juncture.