Odilon Redon: The Complete Story
Odilon Redon was the French painter of dreams, who spent half his life in darkness and the other half in radiant colour. For decades he made eerie black charcoal drawings and prints of floating eyes, smiling spiders and lonely giants. Then, around the age of fifty, he burst into glowing pastels and flowers, as if a light had been switched on.
Few artists have made such a complete journey from nightmare to bloom.
Born: Bordeaux, France, 1840
Known for: Symbolist dream imagery, the dark noirs, late blazing pastels
Died: Paris, 1916
The years of the noirs
Redon called his early works his noirs, his blacks. In charcoal and lithography he drew impossible things: a single eye drifting up like a balloon, a spider with a human grin, the Cyclops peering tenderly over a hill at a sleeping girl. See what is symbolism in art.
These are not illustrations of stories but of moods, fear, wonder, loneliness, drawn straight from the imagination rather than the visible world.
The switch into colour
In his fifties Redon transformed. He set aside the blacks and took up pastel and oil in dazzling colour, painting flowers, mythic scenes and portraits that seem lit from inside. See what is pastel.
His vases of impossible blooms float on dreamy grounds, neither quite real nor quite abstract. The painter of shadows became one of the great colourists of his age.
Dreams over the visible
Redon stood apart from the Impressionists, who chased the light of the real world. He wanted the opposite: to put, as he said, the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. See what is post-impressionism.
That faith in imagination made him a hero to the Symbolists and, later, to the Surrealists, who saw in his floating eyes and dream beasts a direct ancestor.
What readers ask about Odilon Redon
What is Odilon Redon famous for?
Dreamlike Symbolist images, his dark noirs and his later blazing pastels and flowers.
What are the noirs?
His early charcoal and lithograph works in black, full of strange, dreamlike visions.
Why did his work change?
Around his fifties he moved from dark monochrome into radiant colour, a complete turn.
When did he die?
In 1916, in Paris.
Why his dreams still pull
Redon proved that the inner world is as real a subject as any landscape. His floating eye and smiling spider feel like images dredged from sleep, which is exactly why every later artist of the unconscious claims him as a forefather.
One last detail. He came to colour partly through grief and recovery, after years of illness and loss in the family. The man who drew the dark for thirty years met his own light only in middle age, and then never let it go.