Odilon Redon - part 4

Odilon Redon (from Laus Pictorum)
etching by Leonard Baskin

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 4 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:

1886 Night (La Nuit):

Cover for “La Nuit”
bi-fold portfolio cover with text lithographed in black on cream 45.2 x 32.4 cm

The Infinite Search
lithograph 27.6 x 18.2 cm (image)

The Lost Angel then opened Black Wings
lithograph 25.6 x 21.4 cm (image)

The Man was alone in a Night Landscape
 lithograph 29.5 x 22 cm (image)

The Priestesses were Waiting
lithograph 28.6 x 21.2 cm (image)

1886 To Old Age:

To Old Age
conte crayon
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Orsay Museum)

To Old Age
lithograph in black on light grey China paper 2
4.5 x 18.5 cm (chine)

1887 The Juror (Le Juré) by Edmond Picard:

Cover for Le Juré (The Juror)
bi-fold portfolio cover with text lithographed in black on grey wove paper 43.2 x 31.8 cm

A Bell was sounding in the Tower 
lithograph 20.5 x 15.5 cm

A Man of the People, a Savage
lithograph 18.3 x 13.7 cm (image)

Is there not an Invisible World
lithograph 22.2 x 16.9 cm

The Dream has Ended in Death
lithograph 23.7 x 18.7 cm (image)

Through an Opening in the Wall, a Skull appeared
lithograph 23.9 x 18.5 cm (image)

1888 The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

Cover / Frontispiece for the Temptation of St. Anthony
bi-fold portfolio cover with lithograph in black on blue-green wove paper 17.7 x 13.7 cm (image)

It Is a Skull, crowned with Roses. It dominates a Woman's Pearly-White Torso
lithograph 29.7 x 21.7 cm

Plate 1. First a pool of water, then a prostitute,... 
lithograph 29 x 20.6 cm

Plate 2. It's the Devil…
lithograph 25.4 x 20 cm

Plate 3. And a big bird coming down from the sky...
lithograph 19 x 16 cm (image)

Plate 4. He raises the Bronze Urn.
lithograph 27.4 x 19.6 cm (image)

Plate 5. Then there appears a Singular Being, having the Head of a Man on the Body of a Fish.
lithograph 27.6 x 17.1 cm (image)

Plate 7. The Chimera with Green eyes turns, bay.
lithograph 27.5 x 16 cm (image)

Plate 8. And all kinds of dreadful beasts arise.
lithograph 31 x 23 cm

Plate 9. Everywhere pupils are blazing.
lithograph 20.3 x 15.6 cm (image)

Plate 10 And in the very Disk of the Sun lights the Face of Jesus Christ.
lithograph 28.5 x 23 cm (image)

1889 Death: “My irony surpasses all others!” :

Death; “My irony surpasses all others!”
lithograph on ivory China paper 20 x 26 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

2. Death: “My irony surpasses all others!”
lithograph on ivory China paper

*          *          *          *          *

1886 Brunnhilde
lithograph in black on white wove paper 11.8 x 9.9 cm (image)

1886 Cain and Abel
etching 17.7 x x12 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1886 Cain and Abel
etching and drypoint on ivory laid paper 18.4 x 12 cm (plate)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1886 Profile of Light
 lithograph on light grey chine 33.9 X 24.1 cm (image)

1886 The Chimera Gazed at all things with Fear, from Night
lithograph 24.9 x 18.4 cm

c1886 Head of a Young Woman
etching 15.7 x 10.8 cm (image)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

c1886 Through the Crack a Death's-Head was Projected
charcoal and chalk on paper 43.2 x 30.5 cm
MoMA, New York

1887 Christ
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 33 x 27 cm (image)

1887 Dark Peak
 lithograph in black on ivory Japanese paper
16.7 x 9 cm (image)

1887 Dramatic and Grandiose with her Face like that of a Druid Priestess
lithograph in black on ivory China paper
19.2 x 14.3 cm (image)

1887 Girl
lithograph in black on heavy white wove paper
30 x 22.3 cm (image)

1887 In the Maze of Branches, the Pale Figure appeared
lithograph in black on cream Japanese paper
15.3 x 9.9 cm (image)

1887 Menu of a Dinner for French Lithographers, April 1, 1887
lithograph in black on ivory Japanese paper
16.3 x 24 cm (sheet)

1887 Spider
lithograph on ivory China paper 33 x 27 cm (plate)

1887 The Idol, frontispiece from Emile Verhaeren’s Les Soirs
lithograph 16.3 x 9.5 cm (image)

c1887 The Heart has its Reasons
lithographic tusche and lithographic crayon on transfer paper 26.5 x 15.2 cm
MoMA, New York

1888 Des Esseintes, Frontispiece for A Rebours by J.K. Huysmans
lithograph 12.8 x 9 cm (image)

1888 Little Prelate
drypoint 11.6 x 9 cm (plate)

c1888 Pegasus and Bellerophon
charcoal, charcoal with water wash, white chalk, conté crayon, and highlighting on buff paper 53.7 x 36.1 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1889 A Long Chrysalis, the Colour of Blood
lithograph 26 x 19.5 cm (image)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1889 Captive Pegasus
lithograph 34.1 x 29.6 cm chine

1889 Frontispiece for Iwan Gilkin’s Damnation de l’artiste
lithograph in black on ivory wove paper 19 x 12.4 cm (image)

1889 Frontispiece for Les Chimères by Jules Destrée
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 13.9 x 9.6 cm (image)

1889 Frontispiece from Emile Verhaeren’s Les Debacles
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 14.2 x 9.7 cm (image)

1889 Frontispiece to El Moghreb al Aksa by Edmond Picard
lithograph 24.4 x 18.6 cm (image)