Artist

Odilon Redon — the prince of dreams, from black to color

1840, Bordeaux — 1916, Paris

Symbolism

Timeline

1840

Born in Bordeaux on April 20

1879

Dans le rêve, his first album of lithographs

1884

Huysmans's novel À rebours makes his name

1886

Shows at the last Impressionist exhibition

1899

Domecy commission, completed in 1901

1913

Largest representation at the Armory Show

1916

Dies in Paris on July 6

A giant eye floats up into the sky like a hot-air balloon, carrying a severed head beneath it. A spider with a human face grins from ear to ear. A marsh flower holds a sad human face at the end of its stem. For twenty years Odilon Redon worked only in black, in charcoal and lithography, and he filled those sheets with creatures no one had ever seen before.

Then, around the age of fifty, everything changed. The same hands took up pastel and oil, and the work burst into bouquets, seashells, chariots of Apollo, orange and violet skies. The painter of nightmares became the painter of flowers.

His contemporaries called him the prince of dreams. Odilon Redon lived alongside the Impressionists without ever painting like them. Yet he exhibited with them, became the hero of a cult novel, counted Mallarmé and Gauguin among his friends, was revered by the young Nabis, and was the single best-represented artist at the exhibition that introduced modern art to America.

A childhood among the Médoc vineyards

Bertrand Redon was born on April 20, 1840, in Bordeaux. He was called Odilon, after his mother, Odile. A frail child, he was sent away very young to Peyrelebade, the family wine estate at Listrac in the Médoc, where he grew up apart from his parents, in the care of a nurse and an elderly uncle.

Those lonely years, spent watching clouds, open moorland, and the shadows of the old house, fed everything that followed. As an adult Redon often returned to Peyrelebade, until the estate was sold in the late 1890s. He left a few landscapes of it, including a small canvas painted in 1896–97 and now at the Musée d’Orsay.

Two teachers in Bordeaux

His beginnings were a string of failures. Redon failed the entrance exam in architecture, then spent a few months in Paris in 1864 in the studio of the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose teaching left him discouraged. He went back to Bordeaux, and there he found his two real teachers.

The first was not an artist at all. Armand Clavaud was a botanist who specialized in algae and studied the elementary forms of life under the microscope. He drew the young man into the debates around Darwin’s theory and introduced him to Baudelaire and to philosophy. The hybrid beings, half plant, half animal, half human, that would invade Redon’s drawings owe something to that microscope.

The second was the printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin, a solitary figure of enormous talent and miserable circumstances, who taught him etching and lithography. With Bresdin, Redon discovered that an entire world could be built out of black and white.

After serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he settled in Paris.

The Noirs

For nearly twenty years Redon worked only in black. He called these works his “Noirs”: large charcoal drawings on tinted paper, and lithographs that allowed the images to circulate in multiple impressions.

His first album of lithographs, Dans le rêve (In the Dream), appeared in 1879. In the early 1880s came a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, including the famous plate of the eye-balloon drifting toward infinity, then Les Origines in 1883, whose title echoes the theories of evolution he had discovered with Clavaud. Later came a Homage to Goya and three series inspired by Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

These are not illustrations. Redon borrowed a mood or a phrase from his writers, then invented something else. In his journal, published after his death as À soi-même (To Myself), he wrote: “My drawings inspire and are not to be defined.” Floating heads, bodiless eyes, smiling polyps, horsemen of the void: everything stays open, like a dream whose ending you cannot recall.

In 1880 he married Camille Falte, who came from the island of Réunion and supported him to the end. A first son, Jean, died in infancy in 1886; a second, Arï, was born in 1889.

A cult novel’s favorite artist

In 1884 fame came through a novel. In À rebours (Against Nature), Joris-Karl Huysmans created des Esseintes, a decadent aesthete who shuts himself away with his most refined collections. On the walls of his retreat hang drawings by Redon. The book caused a scandal and became the bible of a generation: from then on, Redon’s name circulated through every Symbolist circle.

The poet Stéphane Mallarmé became a lifelong friend. Redon also moved among musicians: he played the violin with Ernest Chausson and knew Claude Debussy.

In 1886 he showed at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, alongside Degas, Pissarro, Seurat and Signac, and began exhibiting in Brussels with the group Les XX. His fantastic black drawings stood out among the sunlit landscapes: Redon exhibited with the Impressionists, but he was never one of them.

Color breaks through

From 1890 on, color crept in, cautiously at first, then with an intensity that startled anyone who knew only the Noirs. Redon adopted pastel, which let him keep the softness of charcoal while opening up a whole new palette: oranges, deep blues, violets, golds.

Closed Eyes (Les Yeux clos), painted in 1890 and now at the Musée d’Orsay, marks the transition. A face with lowered eyelids rises from a stretch of water, between gray and a very pale blue. Nothing happens, and yet the whole picture seems turned inward.

The subjects changed along with the palette. Flowers replaced monsters, painted in vases or floating freely in space, along with butterflies, shells, mythological figures such as Apollo in his chariot or Pandora, saints and buddhas. Backgrounds became clouds of gold and blue, somewhere between sky and abstraction.

The change has often been linked to Arï’s birth, the sale of Peyrelebade, a new peace of mind. Redon himself never disowned the Noirs.

The walls of Domecy and Fontfroide

Around 1900 Redon received his first major decorative commissions. In 1899 Baron Robert de Domecy asked him to decorate the dining room of his château in Burgundy. Redon worked on it until 1901, composing tall panels of flowers, branches and trees against yellow, gray or ocher grounds, with no figures and no perspective, close to abstraction. Fifteen of those panels entered the Musée d’Orsay in 1988.

A decade later the collector Gustave Fayet, a great admirer of both Gauguin and Redon, gave him the library of Fontfroide Abbey near Narbonne, which he had recently bought. In 1910–11 Redon painted two huge facing compositions there, Day and Night. They are still in place and can be seen on a visit to the abbey.

Gauguin, the Nabis and a new generation

Redon probably met Paul Gauguin in 1886. The two shared the conviction that painting should suggest rather than describe. When Gauguin died in the Marquesas in 1903, Redon paid tribute to him in an article, then in a strange portrait now at the Musée d’Orsay: a profile, as if struck on a medal, surrounded by dreamlike flowers against a golden ground.

The young painters of the Nabis group, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, saw him as a master and a friend. In 1899 he exhibited with them at the dealer Durand-Ruel’s. In 1903 the French state made him a knight of the Legion of Honor: the outsider had become a respected figure.

America, 1913

In 1913 the Armory Show brought the European avant-garde to New York, then to Chicago and Boston, before an astonished American public. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase drew most of the ridicule. But the artist with the largest representation in the whole exhibition was a seventy-two-year-old Frenchman: Odilon Redon.

That early exposure helps explain his strong presence in American museums today. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington all hold major groups of his drawings, pastels and paintings.

Redon died in Paris on July 6, 1916, in the middle of the war, while his son Arï was serving at the front. He left a body of work that paved the way for the Surrealists, and that the twentieth century took a long time to see for what it is: one of the most singular of its age.

Where to see Odilon Redon’s work

In Paris

The Musée d’Orsay has the largest Redon collection in France, enriched by the bequest of Arï Redon’s widow. Highlights include Closed Eyes, the portrait of Paul Gauguin, the pastel The Buddha, a portrait of Baroness Robert de Domecy and several of the great Domecy panels. Pastels and drawings, which are sensitive to light, are shown in rotation.

Elsewhere in France and Europe

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, the painter’s hometown, holds a group of his works. Near Narbonne, Fontfroide Abbey still houses Day and Night in the library they were painted for. In the Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller Museum owns The Cyclops, one of his most famous canvases, in which a one-eyed giant gazes down at a sleeping nymph.

In the United States

The Art Institute of Chicago owns one of the most important Redon collections outside France, from the charcoal Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878) to the pastels of his maturity. In Washington, the National Gallery of Art displays Large Vase with Flowers and Evocation of Roussel, and offers open access images of major works such as Pandora, Saint Sebastian and the charcoal The Book of Light. MoMA in New York holds, among others, Apparition.