Odilon Redon
Symbolist of dreams and colour.
Odilon Redon first made black charcoal drawings and lithographs of strange creatures, then luminous flower pictures in pastel.
Odilon Redon was born in 1840 in Bordeaux. He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood on the family’s country estate in the Médoc, alone with nature and his fantasies. He tried to become an architect but failed to gain admission to the course. For a short time he studied painting in Paris. More important was his encounter with the printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin, who taught him etching, and with a botanist who showed him the world of the microscope.
For some twenty years Redon worked almost exclusively in black and white. He called these works his “noirs”. They were charcoal drawings and lithographs with dreamlike and frightening subjects: eyes floating like balloons, spiders with human faces, severed heads and strange plants. In 1879 he published the album In the Dream. He also made lithographs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert. Huysmans mentioned him in the novel Against Nature in 1884, and he became known among the Symbolists.
In 1880 he married Camille Falte. Their first son died in infancy, and a second son was born in 1889. Around 1890 Redon began working in colour, and his art changed completely. He made pastels and oil paintings in brilliant, almost glowing colours: flowers in vases, butterflies, the Buddha, Ophelia among flowers and mythological figures. The Cyclops, a shy giant gazing at a sleeping woman, is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
Redon was calm and reserved but admired by younger artists, especially the Nabis group. He received larger decorative commissions, including one for a monastery library in the south of France. He took part in the great Armory Show in New York in 1913. He died in Paris in 1916.
Redon is regarded as one of the leading artists of Symbolism. His dream world was an important model for the Surrealists, and his richly coloured pastels were admired by Matisse and other modern painters.