Odilon Redon

French painter

• Born: April 20, 1840
• Birthplace: Bordeaux, France
• Died: July 6, 1916
• Place of death: Paris, France

Through long years of artistic experimentation, Redon developed a mysterious, nostalgic, melancholy, and sometimes humorous fantasy world in his paintings, prints, and drawings. This world became his distinctive contribution to the allusive art movement of the end of the nineteenth century called Symbolism that anticipated twentieth century Surrealism.

Early Life

Originally christened Bertrand-Jean, Odilon Redon (ree-dahn) was always known by his nickname, the masculine version of his mother’s name, Marie-Odile. She was an American from New Orleans, Louisiana, where Redon’s French father had established a lucrative business. Shortly before Redon’s birth, his father brought the family permanently back to France. Redon was a sickly child; as a young boy, he was sent to live with an aged uncle at a rural family estate near Bordeaux. The boy lived a reclusive life close to nature, drawing the natural beauty around him and creating his own fantasy world. As an adult, he frequently returned to this home, which served as an unending source of inspiration. A nostalgia for this boyhood home never left him. From the age of eleven, he received professional art training. Originally, his goal was to become an architect, but it became clear that he did not possess the mathematical skills required for such a profession. At that point, his father allowed him to pursue training as an artist.

Redon was keenly interested in playing the violin and reading contemporary literature. His reading included works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and, later, Stéphane Mallarmé. Both of these interests provided excellent background for his eventual artistic direction. The Symbolist style, with which Redon was allied, included musicians, writers, and visual artists. It favored an approach that suggested an emotional tone that was often pessimistic or melancholy, as well as mystical and fantastic, and certainly disturbing, which the viewer was encouraged to imaginatively embellish. Redon created prints, paintings, and drawings that developed these themes and often drew on the works of his favorite writers. Compared with the best-known works of the Symbolists, Redon’s art had a benign cast to it that was more melancholy than disturbing.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-five, Redon began studying painting in Paris under the Romantic-style artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. This was not a happy period for Redon. His teacher’s philosophical attitude toward art was not agreeable to Redon, and he could not fit into the rigid studio regimen. He needed instruction that included a great deal of artistic freedom of expression. Gérôme’s regimen emphasized the realistic reproduction of a subject, but realism was never a productive approach for Redon. Nature only provided a launchpad for his imagination.

In 1863, Redon returned to Bordeaux and continued a more productive period of work and study with his friend, the printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin, who taught him etching and engraving techniques. However, it was Bresdin’s highly imaginative subject matter that really sparked Redon’s interest. It was at this time that Redon immersed himself in the exploration of the graphic possibilities of black and white in both printmaking and drawing. The experimentation directed his work for the rest of his life. He readily understood the mysterious possibilities of shadowy, subtly graded darks that created an atmosphere of fantasy and otherworldliness. Redon studied the graphic works of German artist Albrecht Dürer and the dark-light contrasts of Rembrandt’s etchings to learn technique. Francisco de Goya’s etchings and engravings were also a strong influence on Redon, who was interested not only in Goya’s graphic techniques but also in the psychological fantasy of such works as his Caprichos series (1799). Redon enjoyed creating other worlds that were less specific than those painted by Goya. In 1885, Redon created a lithographic series called Hommage à Goya to celebrate his enthusiasm for the Spanish artist.

Redon transferred the skill he had developed in rich dark-light effects to his charcoal drawings, which he called noirs, and then to lithography. Between 1879 and 1899, he produced twelve series in various graphic techniques, many of which had strong literary associations. The series were based on contemporary poems and novels but were not illustrations for them. Instead, literature provided the stimulus for his own independent interpretations, such as À Edgar Poe (1882). During the 1890’s, Redon drew charcoals and lithographs as separate works based on Baudelaire’s poetry collection, Les Fleurs du mal (1857; Flowers of Evil, 1931).

Two important nonartistic events shaped Redon’s life. The first were the horrors that he experienced as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The tragedies he witnessed affected what was already a pessimistic and imaginative mind. The other event was a happy one. In 1880, at the age of forty, Redon married. His wife, Camille, was an understanding spouse who competently handled the business side of their lives and raised their son.

Redon’s many series of graphic works, along with charcoal drawings, dominated his output for many years. Around 1890, his numerous oil paintings and pastel drawings became more colorful, and the subject matter became more optimistic and less melancholy. This direction grew stronger when, in 1897, the rural family home in which he grew up was sold. It was as if a dark cloud had passed, and it allowed his work to develop in a more positive direction. Rich colors grew more dominant for the remainder of his career. This, too, was consonant with Symbolist theory, which promoted color for its emotional associations.

Redon created a range of imagery that he repeatedly used. A typical example of an image that he used in many different guises in which the context revealed its meaning was an independent eye. The eye first appeared in an 1878 charcoal drawing, The Eye Balloon . The floating eye looks up as it carries its basket above a featureless landscape. A silly element is injected into the scene by the addition of a fringe of eyelashes along the top of the balloon. The image invokes a freedom of consciousness sailing above the trials of daily cares, while the humor of the lashes leavens the seriousness. The combination of the deeply serious and a touch of humor was a frequent characteristic Redon’s work. The eye balloon in a different guise can also mean a retreat into isolation. The eye sometimes appeared alone or as part of another object, such as at the center of an unfurling leaf or flower to anthropomorphize or humanize the consciousness of the plant.

A related but more complicated recurrent image was a severed head with (usually) closed eyes. This image had its acknowledged origin in the severed heads of murder victims, but Redon’s usage, while it did suggest death, had less sinister connections. The closed eyes suggested a dream world, reserve, separation from life, and a higher purpose in the transcendent. Multiple meanings were typical of Symbolist mystical suggestion. Flower imagery was another related symbol. A flower could be a human head with the previously mentioned multiple meanings attached to it. Flower or plant growth also suggested primordial themes that explored the concept of life-forms before the human race existed and related that to transcendent consciousness. The complexity of interrelated ideas had a basic appeal for Symbolist artists.

In 1903, Redon received official recognition from the French government when he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Another honor followed in 1904, when the French government purchased one of his paintings. He was well enough known by then that an entire room was devoted to his works at the autumn art exhibition in Paris. By this time, his work displayed less tension and anxiety: He often painted portraits and flowers, explored mythological subjects, and used brilliant colors. In 1913, Redon’s international fame grew when he was included in the controversial Armory Show in were chosen. This exhibition introduced modern art in its various forms to the United States and was much discussed, praised, or damned depending on the critic.

Significance

Odilon Redon did not find his mature voice until he was forty years old. After that time, his works were exhibited widely in France and the United States. As a Symbolist artist, he developed the image of the eye balloon floating freely above the world as a personal and universal metaphor for the questing soul. This allusive image, which developed from Redon’s identity as an outsider in society and the art world, eventually influenced the Surrealist art movement of the 1920’s and 1930’s, which delved into the dream and fantasy worlds explored by Freudian psychology. The Surrealists, in their turn, became an ever-present influence on the art of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Bacou, Roseline. Odilon Redon: Pastels. Translated by Beatrice Rehl. New York: George Braziller, 1987. This monograph on Redon’s pastels includes seventy color reproductions with a short discussion of each. Bacou’s introduction discusses the pastels by referring to quotations from figures in the Paris art world. Included are two short but important documents about Redon’s life: The first is made up of photographs of Redon, and the second is a twelve-page autobiography.

Delevoy, Robert L. Symbolists and Symbolism. New York: Rizzoli, 1982. Delevoy defines Symbolism by discussing the various topics that constitute approaches to subject. This short work is profusely illustrated with examples by a large number of artists, including Redon.

Druick, Douglas W., ed. Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. This is a sizable exhibition catalog (464 pages) celebrating the centennial of Redon’s first retrospective exhibition. It contains the fullest treatment available in English of the artist’s biography, extensive reproduction of his works, examples of artistic influences, and an analysis of his working techniques. The extensive bibliography contains all of Redon’s published art criticism and personal journals.

Eisenman, Stephen F. The Temptation of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and Style in the “Noirs” of Odilon Redon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. This study investigates Redon’s utopian subject matter, which the author sees as reconciling the artist’s feelings of powerlessness that stemmed from a lonely childhood.

Keay, Carolyn, ed. Odilon Redon. New York: Rizzoli, 1977. This short introduction to Redon’s work contains sixty-six color and black-and-white reproductions.

Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. The Symbolist Generation: 1870-1910. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Mathieu discusses the Symbolist style by defining the subgroups within the movement and identifying the differences created by geographical location.

Théberge, Pierre. Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe. Montreal, Que.: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995. This 555-page exhibition catalog gives a comprehensive presentation of the Symbolist art movement. The discussion centers on the various topics that the style used as subjects.

Werner, Alfred. The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon. New York: Dover, 1969. This is the most complete overview of Redon’s graphic works published with an English introduction. Two hundred nine lithographs, etchings, and engravings are included. The ten-page introduction is short but pithy.

Wilson, Michael. Nature and Imagination: The Work of Odilon Redon. London: Phaidon Press, 1978. Wilson provides a short but thorough discussion of the life and artistic career of Redon. The book contains seventy illustrations, many in color, with a few examples of works by artists who influenced Redon.