Christa Giles

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spectator’s own ˝imaginative aptitude to enlarge or
diminish˝ 392 what he sees. Consequently, Redon asserted
his belief in an intellectual art, and like Wilde believed that
to contemplate ˝was the most difficult thing in the world,
the most difficult and the most intellectual.˝ 393
Therefore, onto the purely painterly sensory
impression was grafted an intellectual symbolic element
which conveyed and provoked thought:
We know now that we do not see with the eye
or hear with the ear. They are merely
channels for the transmission, adequate or
inadequate, of sense-impressions. It is in the
brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is
odorous, that the skylark sings. 394
The admixture of the real and unreal enabled the sensory to
function as purveyor of thought, to give pictorial form to
the world of the psyche. Redon connected the idea with
thought, with that of man’s unconscious life. In A soi-même,
his journal, he explains that the expression of life can only
exist in the shadows or half lights:
L’homme est un être pensant, l’homme sera
toujours là dans le temps, dans la durée, et
tant ce qui est de la lumière ne saurait
l’écarter. L’avenir au contraire est au monde
subjectif. 395