ART & ARTISTS: Odilon Redon

Wednesday 22 June 2022

Odilon Redon - part 3

1885 Self-Portrait
oil on canvas 65.2 x 50 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 3 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:

1881 The Convict
charcoal on paper 53.3 x 37.1 cm
MoMA, New York

1881 The Crying Spider
charcoal
Private Collection

1881 The Eye (Vision)
various charcoals with incising, stumping, and traces of pastel 42 x 36.9 cm
Baltimore museum of Art, MD

c1881 Head of Orpheus
charcoal on coloured paper 44.5 x 53.7 cm
MoMA, New York

c1881 Imaginary Figure
chalk and charcoal on paper 35.6 x 33 cm
MoMA, New York

1882 The Crow
charcoal on cream paper 51 x 36 cm
Louvre, Paris © DEC

1882 The Fairy (Profile of Light)
charcoal and chalk on paper 35.9 x 26 cm
MoMA, New York

1882 The Port of Morgat
oil on canvas 26.9 x 29.5 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, TX

1882 To Edgar Poe (Prints):

0 Cover / Frontispiece
lithograph in brick red on light blue wove paper 16.4 x 11.6 cm

Plate 1. The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity
lithograph on ivory China paper 26.3 x 19.8 cm (image)

Plate 2. Before the Black Sun of Melancholy, Lenore Appears
lithograph 16.8 x 12.8 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Plate 3. A Mask Sounds the Funeral Knell
lithograph on ivory China paper 26 x 19.3 cm (image)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Plate 4. On the Horizon the Angel of Certitude, and in the Somber Heaven a Questioning Eye
lithograph 27 x 20.5 cm (image)

Plate 5. The Breath which leads living Creatures
lithograph 27.3 x 20.8 cm

Plate 6. Madness
lithograph 14.5 x 20.1 cm (image)

1883 Le Origines par Odilon Redon (8 plates):

Cover-Frontispiece for Les Origines
lithograph 30.7 x 22.5 cm (image)

Plate 1. When Life Was Awakening in the Depths of Obscure Matter
lithograph 27.6 x 20.2 cm (image)

Plate 2. There Was Perhaps a First Vision Attempted in the Flower
lithograph on light grey chine 22.5 x 17.7 cm (image)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Plate 3. The Misshapen Polyp Floated on the Shores, a Sort of Smiling and Hideous Cyclops
lithograph on light grey China paper 21.3 x 20 cm (image)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Plate 4. Siren Coming out of the Waves, Dressed in Flames
lithograph 30.3 x 23.5 cm (image)

Plate 5. The Satyr with the Cynical Smile
lithograph 24.2 x 20.7 cm (image)

Plate 6. There Were Struggles and Vain Victories
lithograph 29.1 x 22.3 cm (image)

Plate 7. The Impotent Wing Did Not Lift the Animal Into That Black Space
lithograph 29.5 x 22.2 cm (image)

Plate 8. And Man Appeared; Questioning the Earth From Which He Emerged and Which Attracted Him, He Made His Way Toward Somber Brightness
lithograph 28 x 21 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

* * * * *

1883 Centaur Aiming at the Clouds
lithograph 31.5 x 25.7 cm (image)

1883 Chimera
charcoal and chalk on paper 50.4 x 34 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1883 Fishing Village, Brittany
oil on canvas 19.4 x 33 cm
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

1883 Madame Odilon
oil on canvas 45.5 x 37.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

1883, reworked 1893 The Beacon
pastel, charcoal and touches of black chalk, stumping and erasing, on pale-pink wove paper 51.5 x 37.2 cm

1883 The little Abbot reading the Ramayana
charcoal with black chalk, stumping, scraping and erasing, on dark cream wove paper 50.5 x 37.2 cm

1883 The Masque of the Red Death
charcoal and chalk on paper 43.7 x 35.8 cm
MoMA, New York

1883 The Sphinx
charcoal with touches of black chalk, stumping, wiping, and erasing, on pale-pink wove paper 52.6 x 37.7 cm

1883 The Teeth
charcoal and chalk on paper 51.1 x 36.8 cm
MoMA, New York

1883 The Tell-Tale Heart
charcoal on brown paper 39.9 x 33.3 cm
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA

1883 Village Square, Brittany
oil on composition board 20.9 x 28.5 cm
Harvard Art Museums - Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

c1883 Rocks on the Beach
oil on paper mounted on canvas 26 x 36.2 cm
MoMA, New York

c1883 Trees in the Blue Sky
oil over traces of graphite on light-brown wove paper
30.2 x 24.1 cm
MoMA, New York

1885 Suggestion (reworked later)
charcoal and black pastel, Conté crayon, incising, stumping, wiping, erasing, and subtractive brushwork, on pale-pink wove paper 52.4 x 36.8 cm