Odilon Redon: The Complete Story
Odilon Redon spent thirty years drawing in black and became one of history's great colourists anyway. Born in Bordeaux in 1840, he made floating eyes and smiling spiders in charcoal, then, past fifty, turned to pastel and let the light in.
Few careers split so cleanly in two: the noirs, then the flowers. The hinge between them is the story.
Odilon Redon at a glance:
1840: born in Bordeaux and sent to be raised at Peyrelebade, a lonely family estate in the Médoc.
1879: publishes Dans le Rêve, the first album of lithograph noirs, sold by subscription.
1890: the suicide of his mentor, the botanist Armand Clavaud, closes the darkest chapter of the noirs.
1899: colour takes over: pastels, flowers and closed eyes replace the charcoal monsters almost entirely.
1916: dies in Paris while his son is at the front; the studio inventory lists the noirs and the flowers side by side.
A childhood at Peyrelebade
Redon was sent as a sickly infant to the family estate at Peyrelebade in the Medoc and spent his childhood there, half abandoned, watching clouds. The loneliness became a method: he trained with the botanical draughtsman Armand Clavaud, learned printmaking from Rodolphe Bresdin, and settled into charcoal as other men settle into a trade.
The noirs
From the 1870s to the 1890s he worked almost exclusively in black: charcoals and lithograph albums with titles like In Dream in 1879 and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon of 1882, dedicated to Poe.
Floating heads, winged eyes, the smiling spider: images from nowhere in nature, drawn with absolute botanical calm.
Huysmans put him beside Moreau in A Rebours in 1884, and the Symbolists took him as their draughtsman of the unconscious, a generation before the word settled.
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The hinge: grief, then colour
The turn had causes: his first son Jean died in infancy in 1886; his second, Ari, born in 1889, lived, and the family's fortunes steadied.
Through the 1890s the blacks loosened, and after 1900 Redon worked almost wholly in pastel and oil, flower pieces, Buddhas, chariots of Apollo, colour handled like a man released.
At the first Salon d'Automne retrospective devoted to him, in 1904, the man of the noirs was consecrated as a master of colour at 64.
The myth: the mad dreamer
Because the noirs are nightmares, Redon is cast as a haunted eccentric.
He was in fact among the most methodical artists of his time: a devoted husband and father, an exhibitor with the Independants, a writer of lucid journals, and his monsters were constructed, he insisted, with the logic of the visible put at the service of the invisible.
The Surrealists loved him precisely because the impossible was drawn as if from life.
Where to see Redon
The Musee d'Orsay holds the great pastels and the decorative panels from Fontfroide; the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA keep the noirs in depth, and the Kroller-Muller in the Netherlands has the largest collection outside France. He died in Paris in 1916, while his son was at the front.
The botanist's apprentice
The strangeness had a laboratory source. In Bordeaux the botanist Armand Clavaud showed the young Redon plants under the microscope, the border where plant life shades into animal.
Clavaud read him Darwin, Hindu poetry and Poe. The floating eyes and germinating heads of the noirs are that microscope slide, dreamed.
When Clavaud killed himself in 1890, Redon answered the only way he had: with a portfolio of prints, Songes, dedicated to his memory.
Lithography, the poor man's museum
The noirs traveled as albums: Dans le Rêve in 1879, then portfolios for Poe, Goya, Flaubert and the Apocalypse, editions of a few dozen sold by subscription.
Prints let a nearly unknown painter reach Brussels and The Hague without a dealer; the Belgian avant-garde adopted him before Paris did.
About two hundred lithographs in all, then he dropped the medium almost overnight when colour arrived, as if the stone had been a tunnel and he was through.
Decorating paradise
The last surprise: Redon became a decorator. In 1900 the baron de Domecy ordered panels for his château dining room, fields of flowering almost-abstraction now reassembled at Orsay.
In 1910, at 70, he painted Day and Night across the library of Fontfroide abbey, the world of the noirs and the world of colour facing each other at architectural scale.
The recluse of the charcoals ended as a muralist of gardens. Both, he insisted, were the same interior country.
The Odilon Redon questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? The charcoal noirs of the 1870s to 1890s, then radiant pastels and flower pieces.
Why did he change to colour? After the mid 1890s, family peace and a long inner shift let the light in; he never fully explained it.
What is The Smiling Spider? An 1881 charcoal of a grinning ten legged spider, the most famous of the noirs.
When did he die? In Paris in 1916, at 76.
Was Redon part of a movement? The Symbolists claimed him, the Nabis revered him, the Surrealists annexed him after his death. He signed nothing but his name.
Did Redon write? Yes: a lifelong journal published as À soi-même. Its best-known line is the program itself: putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.
More secrets to unlock
The room where colour went wild
The noirs and the flowers finally shared a wall in 1904, when the new Salon d'Automne gave Redon an entire room, its first ever artist retrospective. The same salon, one year later, would launch the Fauves: the quiet man of the charcoals opened the very room where colour went wild.
