For some twenty years Odilon Redon worked almost only in black, and his charcoal monsters won the admiration of Symbolist poets. He was nearly sixty when color took over his work and brought him commissions for whole rooms. His largest pastel then hung in a château dining room for over a hundred years, and a long canvas crowded with his friends' faces is now bound by law to its room.
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From Charcoal to Color
Odilon Redon, born in Bordeaux in 1840, is among the major painters of Symbolism, a movement of writers and artists of the late nineteenth century who put dreams, myths and inner life ahead of the visible world.
For about twenty years he kept almost entirely to black, with charcoal and lithography, a way of printing drawings made on stone. Around 1900 color took over, in pastel and oil, and the artist of black visions also became a painter of blossoms and of whole decorated walls.
Black or color, Redon rarely invented from nothing. A play, a scientific theory, a myth, a statue or a friend's face lies behind most of what he made.
12. Night (1910 to 1911)
Pale faces float in a dark mass of blue and green vegetation, some seated, some drifting, with patches of orange, pink and violet light between them. The canvas is more than six meters long, and it still hangs in the room for which it was made.
That room is the library of Fontfroide, a medieval abbey near Narbonne, in southern France, and it sits above one of the galleries of the cloister. The collector Gustave Fayet, who owned the abbey, asked his friend Redon for three canvases to decorate it. Night faces Day across the room, and above the door a third canvas, Silence, shows a face with a finger to its lips.
Redon painted the three in 1910 and oversaw their installation in 1911. Into the foliage of Night he slipped about thirty portraits of people close to him: members of the Fayet family, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, the painter Richard Burgsthal, and Redon himself.
Keeping those faces in that room turned out to be a legal question. Fontfroide is a listed historic monument, but in France protecting a building does not protect the pictures on its walls. An order issued in 1988 to cover Redon's canvases was overturned by an administrative court.
The answer came more than thirty years later. The three canvases were listed in December 2021, then classified in December 2022 as a historic ensemble of furnishings, a status that obliges them to stay where they are. The decision gives the reason in one phrase: they were "specially conceived and made to form the decoration of this room."
At a Glance
Artist: Odilon Redon (1840 to 1916)
Painted: 1910 to 1911
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: About 200 × 650 cm (79 × 256 in)
Where to see it: Library of Fontfroide Abbey, near Narbonne, France
11. Grand Bouquet (1901)
Orange, pink, white and yellow blooms spill out of a blue vase and spread across a pale, cloudy ground. All of it is drawn in pastel, on a larger scale than any other pastel Redon made. It hung on a dining room wall in a château in Burgundy, and it stayed there for over a century, long after the rest of the room's decoration had gone.