Odilon Redon, Painter

Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot found an apartment for their next exhibition

above the popular Restaurant Doré, and put down a month’s rent.  Camille assembled a roster of seventeen painters, including old reliables and a new painter, Odilon Redon, an experimenter and seeker after an interior reality, who painted his own dream world.  His remarkable lithographs were described as going from a profound black to a blinding white.

Depths of Glory, A Biographical Novel of Camille Pissarro by Irving Stone p. 523

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Odilon Redon  (1840 – 1916) was a French  symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist. Redon’s father made his fortune in the slave trade in Louisiana in the 1830s. Redon was conceived in New Orleans and the couple made the transatlantic journey back to France while pregnant.

Odilon Redon started drawing as a child and at the age of ten, he was awarded a drawing prize at school. He began the formal study of drawing at fifteen but, at his father’s insistence, he changed to architecture. Failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect.

Back in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpting, and was instructed in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he was drafted to serve in the army in the Franco-Prussian War until its end in 1871. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris and resumed working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs.

It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters. He published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879.  Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon’s drawings.

In the 1890s pastel and oils became his favored media. Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture where he derived many of ideas for his paintings.

Baron Robert de Domecy (1867–1946) commissioned the artist in 1899 to create 17 decorative panels for the dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault near Sermizelles in Burgundy.  He also commissioned him to paint portraits of his wife and their daughter Jeanne.  Redon had created large decorative works for private residences in the past, but his compositions for the château de Domecy in 1900–1901 were his most radical compositions to that point and mark the transition from ornamental to abstract painting.

In 1903 Redon was awarded the Legion of Honor, the highest order of merit for military and civil  merits. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published in 1913. That same year, he was given the largest single representation at the groundbreaking U.S. International Exhibition of Modern Art (aka Armory Show), in New York City, Chicago and Boston.

During his early years as an artist, Redon’s works were described as “a synthesis of nightmares and dreams”, as they contained dark, fantastical figures from the artist’s own imagination. His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible”. Odilon Redon said:

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted  an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.

View all of Odilon Redon’s 454 art works.

Sources:  art institute of Chicago; wiki, wikiart.org