Monday 20 June 2022

Odilon Redon - part 2

c1880 Self-Portrait
oil on canvas 46.4 x 33.3 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

Odilon Redon (1840 Bordeaux - 1916 Paris) was a French Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher of considerable poetic sensitivity and imagination, whose work developed along two divergent lines. His prints explore haunted, fantastic, often macabre themes and foreshadowed the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. His oils and pastels, chiefly still lifes with flowers, won him the admiration of Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colourist.

Redon studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme; and mastered engraving from Rodolphe Vresdin, who exerted an important influence; and learned lithography under Henri Fantin-Latour. His aesthetic was one of imagination rather than visual perception. His imagination found an intellectual catalyst in his close friend, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Redon was also associated with the group of Symbolist painters.

Redon produced nearly 200 prints, beginning in 1879 with the lithographs collectively titled In the Dream. He completed another series (1882) dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems had been translated into French with great success by Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire. Rather than illustrating Poe, Redon’s lithographs are poems in visual terms, themselves evoking the poet’s world of private torment. There is an evident link to Goya in Redon’s imagery of winged demons and menacing shapes, and one of his series was the Homage to Goya (1885).

About the time of the print series The Apocalypse of St. John (1889), Redon began devoting himself to painting and colour drawing—sensitive floral studies, and heads that appear to be dreaming or lost in reverie. He developed a unique palette of powdery and pungent hues. Though there is a relationship between his work and that of the Impressionist painters, he opposed both Impressionism and Realism as wholly perceptual.


This is part 2 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:


c1875 Landscape with Rocks, near Royan
oil over black chalk on grey card-stock 21.3 x 26.7 cm
MoMA, New York

c1875 The Rocky Slope
oil over black chalk on tan card-stock, mounted on canvas
25.1 x 32.7 cm
MoMA, New York

c1875 Tree
black charcoal with touches of brown charcoal, stumping, scraping and erasing, on ivory wove paper 49.3 x 38.2 cm

c1875 Turnip
oil on cardboard 23 x 32.7 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

c1875 Windmill
pastel on coloured paper 42.2 x 51.8 cm
MoMA, New York

1876 Melancholy
charcoal, gouache, pastel, black chalk, stumping and erasing on pink wove paper 36.8 x 35.7 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

c1876 Primitive Being
charcoals and black chalk, with stumping, wiping, and erasing, fixed, on cream wove paper 44.5 x 36.9 cm

1877 Head of a Martyr
charcoal and pencil on paper 36.6 x 36.3 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1877 Profile of a Woman
charcoal on paper 26.4 x 28.4 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1877 Mephistopheles, also known as Harlequin
pencil and coloured conté crayon on paper 16.8 x 12.7 cm
MoMA, New York

1878 Eye-Balloon
charcoal and chalk on coloured paper 42.2 x 33.3 cm
MoMA, New York

1878 Guardian Spirit of the Waters
charcoal, black chalk, stumping on cream wove paper
46.6 x 37.6 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1878 Tears
charcoal with opaque white watercolour on paper 44.5 x 35.6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

c1878-79 A Severed Head
charcoal on buff paper 39.5 x 37 cm
© Louvre Museum, dist. RMN-Grand Palais

1878/82 The Die, also called the Weight of Passions
graphite with pen and black ink, heightened with white lead (discoloured) on cream wove paper 17.1 x 12.7 cm

c1878 The Celt
charcoal, chalk, and white chalk on paper 45.4 c 36.5 cm
MoMA, New York

1879 Cauldron of the Sorceress
charcoal, stumping, erasing, and incising, on pale-pink wove paper 40.8 x 37.1 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1879 In Dreams:

Cover-Frontispiece
lithograph on tan wove paper 30.2 x 22.3 cm



Plate 1. Blossoming
lithograph 33.4 x 25.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL



Plate 2. 1879 Germination
lithograph 27.3 x 19.5 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL



Plate 3. The Wheel
lithograph 23.3 x 19.9 cm



Plate 4. Limbo
lithograph 30.7 x 22.3 cm



Plate 5. The Gambler
lithograph 27.3 x 19.3 cm



Plate 6. Gnome 
lithograph 27.5 x 22.3 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL



Plate 7. Felineness
lithograph 27.1 x 20.4 cm (image)



Plate 8. 1879 Vision
lithograph 27.6 x 19.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL



Plate 9. Sad Ascent
lithograph 27 x 20 cm



Plate 10. On the Dish
lithograph 24.4 x 16.3 cm

c1879-85 Sketchbook:


















*          *          *          *          *

1880 Faust and Mephistopheles
charcoal with wiping, stumping, erasing, and incising, on cream wove paper 40 x 32 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1880 Portrait of Madame Redon embroidering
pastel 58 x 42 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

1880 Profile of Glory (Caesar)
charcoal on paper 36.3 x 31 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1880 Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor)
charcoal, black chalk, conté crayon, and stumping on cream wove paper 40.4 x 33.2 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

c1880-92 Saint George and the Dragon
charcoal and pastel on tan wove paper 53.7 x 37.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1880-95 Chimera
charcoal on buff wove paper 50.9 x 37.8 cm
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

c1880 Dream Vision
etching and drypoint on buff wove paper 12 x 12.3 cm (plate)

1880c Dream Vision
etching and drypoint on ivory wove paper 8.8 x 10.2 cm

c1880 Human Plant
charcoal with black pastel, stumping, scraping and erasing, on ivory wove paper 47.3 x 34.2 cm

c1880 The Well
charcoal and chalk on paper 35.6 x 23.8 cm
MoMA, New York

c1880 Tobias
etching and drypoint on white wove paper 16.5 x 11.7 cm (image)

c1880 Village by the Sea in Brittany
oil on cardboard on hardboard 25 x 32.3 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1881 Caliban, little Monster or Gnome
charcoal on buff paper 49.9 x 36.7 cm
© Louvre Museum, dist. RMN-Grand Palais

1881 Head of Orpheus floating in the water
black chalk, and charcoal on paper 41.6 x 34.5 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1881 Head Wearing a Phrygian Cap, on a Salver
charcoal with black chalk, stumping, scraping and erasing, on pale pink wove paper 48.4 x 36.3 cm

1881 The Battle of the Bones
charcoal on paper 44.7 x 37.3 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands


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