Odilon Redon - part 5

n.d. Self-Portrait
charcoal on tan wove paper

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 5 of 13 on the works of Odilon Redon:

1889 The Temptation of St. Antony:

Title page
lithograph

Saint Anthony: “Beneath her long hair, which covered her face, I thought I recognised Ammonaria”
lithograph 28.8 x 23.1 cm (image)

Frontispiece
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 27.7 x 20.4 cm

Saint Anthony; “Somewhere there must be primordial shapes whose bodies are only images
lithograph 17 x 12.3 cm (image)

The Sphinx; “…my gaze that nothing can deflect, passing through objects, remains fixed on an inaccessible horizon.”
lithograph 28.2 x 20.2 cm (image)

1889-94 Closed Eyes:

1889 In Heaven or Closed Eyes
oil on cardboard 45 x 35 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

1890 Closed Eyes
lithograph 21.7 x 18.4 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1890 Closed Eyes
lithograph in blue on ivory wove paper 29.5 x 23 cm (image)

1890 Closed Eyes
lithograph in grey-green on cream China paper
31.2 x 24.2 cm (image)

1890 Closed Eyes
oil on canvas 44 x 36 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

1890 Closed Eyes
details not found

c1890 Closed Eyes
conté crayon and lithographic tusche on transfer paper
35.6 x 26.2 cm
MoMA, New York

1894 Closed Eyes
oil on board
Private Collection

c1894 Closed Eyes
oil on canvas
Private Collection

1890 Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Charles Baudelaire published 1923 

(9 plates - not all found here):

Cover/Frontispiece
bi-fold portfolio cover printed in black by photogravure from an original drawing, on blue-grey wove paper
25.6 x x 16.4 cm (plate)

I adore you as I adore the vault of the night sky
O vessel of sadness, O tall silent woman
 photogravure 28 x 20.9 cm (plate)

Sometimes one finds an old reminiscing flask
whence issues in full life a returning soul
 photogravure 27.8 x 19.8 cm (plate)

Ceaselessly by my side the demon stirs
 photogravure made from an original drawing
25.6 x 20.7 cm (plate)

Plate 4. If on a close dark night a good Christian
out of charity
behind some old ruin, buries your arched body
photogravure 26.6 x 21 cm (plate)

1891 Dreams (Songes):

Cover
lithograph 46 x 32.7 cm (folded)

Plate 1. It was a Veil, an Imprint
lithograph 18.5 x 13.2 cm (image)

Plate 2. And Beyond, the Astral Idol, the Apotheosis
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 27.7 x 19.3 cm (image)

Plate 3. Precarious Glimmering, a Head Suspended from Infinity
lithograph 27.4 x 22.6 cm (image)

Plate 4 Beneath the Wing of Shadow the Black Creature was Biting Energetically
lithograph 22.5 x 17.2 cm (image)

Plate 6. Day
lithograph 21 x 15.7 cm (image)

*          *         *          *         *

1889 The Skiapods: “The head as low as possible, that is the secret of happiness!”
lithograph in black on ivory China paper 27.7 x 21 cm (image)

before 1890 Don Quixote
black crayon, black conté crayon and brown/black ink with scratch-work on tracing paper 29.9 x 22.4 cm (sheet)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

1890 Frontispiece for Les Flambeaux noirs by Emile Verhaeren
lithograph 17.4 x 12 cm (image)

1890 Glory and Praise to You, Satan... 
photogravure from original drawing 21 x 21.1 cm (plate)
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1890 I adore You
copper-print 32.4 x 25 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1890 Sensuality, elastic Phantom!
copperprint 32.5 x 25.2 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1890 Serpent - Halo
transfer lithograph on mounted ivory China paper
 30.4 x 22.7 cm

1890 The black Torches
lithograph (chine appliqué) 35.9 x 27.6 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1890 Tomb of a Poet
copper-print 32 x 25.4 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890-95 Lady of the Flowers
oil on canvas
Honolulu Museum of Art

c1890-95 The Muse
charcoal and chalk on paper 37.7 x 38 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890-1900 Woman with Wildflowers
pastel and charcoal
The Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam

c1890-1910 Imagination
ink on paper 11.4 x 18.9 cm
 Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1890-99 Sketch of Trees
charcoal and black chalk with black pastel, stumping, scraping and erasing on ivory wove paper 31.8 x 21.5 cm

c1890 Breton Village
oil on canvas 22.5 x 32.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

c1890 Profile of a young girl
red chalk on paper 40.6 x 37.1 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890 Symbolic Head
oil on paper mounted on canvas 53.3 x 38 cm

c1890 The Apparition
oil on paper mounted on cradled panel 52.6 x 36.9 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890 The Druidess
charcoal and chalk on paper 48 x 35 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890 The Hair
brown and black chalk on paper 49 x 36.4 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890 Tree and Stump
charcoal on light tan wove paper 36.8 x 31..6 cm
Harvard Art Museums - Fogg Museum
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

c1890 Under the Arch
charcoal and chalk on paper 50.6 x 37.3 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

c1890 Woman and serpent (Mystery)
 charcoal and chalk on paper 52.3 x 37.4 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1890s The Trees
charcoal on paper 50.2 x 37.5 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

1891 And over there, the Astral Idol, the Apotheosis
lithograph 17.8 x 19.2 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1891 Armour
charcoal and conté crayon 50.7 x 36.8 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1891 Druidesse
transfer lithograph 23 x 20.2 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1891 Female Saint and Thistle
lithograph in black on white China paper
28.6 x 20.7 cm (image)

1891 In the shadow of the wing, the black creature bit
lithograph 22.5 x 17.3 cm (image)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York