The Indescribable Meaning of Art--Odilon Redon's Floral Paintings and the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity

Abstract

This paper examines the late floral paintings of Odilon Redon, produced between the 1910s and the final years of his life. It argues that Redon's floral paintings function as phenomenological events that actively restructure the viewer's experience of viewing and enable intersubjectivity with the artist. Methodologically, the paper employs a phenomenological approach grounded in Husserl's concept of epoché. Rather than decoding iconography or tracing symbolic meaning, the analysis attends to how Redon's paintings suspend the viewer's habitual reception. Through the intensely saturated flowers in formation and the presence of eye-like flowers that appear to return the viewer's gaze, Redon disrupts representational reading and destabilises the conventional subject-object hierarchy of viewing. By situating Redon's floral paintings at the intersection of Symbolist aesthetics and phenomenological experience, this paper ultimately argues that the meaning of art emerges not through language or symbolic representations, but through intersubjectivity, which remains indescribable.