A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)

A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)

Odilon Redon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Despite their close relationship, Redon and the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé worked together only once. Dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard commissioned the artist to produce a series of lithographs to accompany an edition of Mallarmé’s "Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard" (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). This is one of four prints that resulted though the project was abandoned after the poet’s death in 1898. The indecipherable quality of Redon’s image matches the ambiguity of the text.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)A Trial Plate for Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (A Throw of the Dice)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.