Odilon Redon

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Odilon Redon (April 22, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a Symbolist painter, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France.

Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he would later study there under Jean-Léon Gerôme.

Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, A rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings.

In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's.

In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor.

His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.

In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur.

In 2005 The Museum of Modern Art (New York City) launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.

Contents 1 Analysis of his work 2 Citations 3 References 4 Selected works 5 Other works 6 External links

[edit] Analysis of his work

The mystery and the evocation of the drawings are best described by Huysmans in the following passage:

Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a dreadful spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium ^[1].

As Huysmans notes, Redon was interested in a distinct perversion of the soul. He describes this more fully in a letter he wrote in 1871:

But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos, if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face^[2].

Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined ^[3].

[edit] Citations

1. ^ (Huysmans 1998, p. 52-53).
2. ^ (Rimbaud 1966, p. 307).
3. ^ (Goldwater and Treves 1945, p. 360)

[edit] References

• Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1998), Against Nature, translated by Margaret Mauldon, Oxford University Press

• Rimbaud, Arthur (1966), Complete Works, Selected Letters, University of Chicago Press

• Artists on Art, edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves (Pantheon, 1945).

[edit] Selected works

Beatrice, 1885.	Cactus Man, 1881.	Deux jeunes filles en fleurs (Two Young Girls Among Flowers), circa 1905 - 1912, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.	Eye-Balloon, 1876, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Flower Clouds, 1903, The Art Institute of Chicago.	Flowers, 1903, Kunstmuseum, St Gallen, Switzerland.	Flowers in a Turquoise Vase, circa 1911.	Homage to Leonardo da Vinci, 1908, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
La Barque Mystique (The Mysterious Boat), circa 1890 - 1895.	La coquille (The Seashell), 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.	Le Bouddha (The Buddha), 1904.	Les yeux clos (Closed Eyes), 1890, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Mystery, date unknown, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.	Mystical Knight (Oedipus and the Sphinx), 1894, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.	Ophelia, circa 1900 - 1905.	Panel, circa 1902, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, The Netherlands.
Parsifal, 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.	Pegasus, 1900, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.	Profile and Flowers, 1912, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.	Red Boat with Blue Sails, 1907.
Saint John, 1892.	Spirit of the Forest, 1880.	The Crying Spider, 1881.	The Cyclops, 1914, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
The Druidess, 1893	The Golden Cell, 1892, The British Museum, London.	The Raven, 1882, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.	The Red Sphinx 1912.
The Smiling Spider, 1881, Musee du Louvre, Paris.	The Winged Man (The Fallen Angel), circa 1880, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.	Woman with a Yellow Bodice, 1899, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

[edit] Other works

• A Gustave Flaubert - (1889)
• Araignée (Spider) - (1887)
• Head of Orpheus - (1905)
• La Tentation de Saint Antoine - (1888)
• Les Fleurs du mal - (1890)
• Les Origines - (1883)
• Songes - (1891)

[edit] External links

• odilonredon.net - Online biography and pictures of Odilon Redon
• Artcyclopedia - Links to Redon's works
• The Athenaeum - Extensive list and images of Redon's works
• Web Museum - Biography and images of Redon's works
• MoMA Exhibition - "Beyond the Visible - The Art of Odilon Redon" - MoMA exhibition (October 2005 - January 2006)