Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon’s oeuvre marks the threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and thus also represents the interplay between tradition and innovation. Fractures and contrasts characterize his artistic development, from the black-and-white of his early, dark lithographs and works in charcoal to the veritable explosions of color in his bright pastels and oils. Bizarre monsters appear alongside heavenly creatures in a blend of dream and nightmare, nature and vision. Tending toward internalization, the mythic, sacred and biological motifs in Redon’s works underwent a turn toward the mystical, not only on account of his subject matter, but also through the aesthetic aspects of color and form. Greatly admired by contemporaries such as Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas, Redon influenced artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Surrealists. The artist’s brilliant ideas and his contextually, technically and materially multifaceted body of work are presented in this catalogue.
Born in France to a prosperous family, Odilon Redon (1840–1916) began drawing at an early age and moved to Paris after unsuccessful forays into architecture and sculpture. Redon began his career working primarily in charcoal and lithography, before transitioning to oils and pastels in the 1890s. With his keen interest in literature, Redon found champions and collaborators in Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emile Hennequin and, most significantly, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Redon’s work achieved international renown after being exhibited at the American Armory Show in 1913.

Published on the occasion of the largest ever Odilon Redon retrospective, held at the Grand Palais in Paris in the spring of 2011, this chunky but pocketbook-size paperback volume reproduces all 256 artworks included in the landmark exhibition. It begins with Redon’s “Self-Portrait” of 1867 and then examines his famous suites of lithographs, including Dans le Rêve and the classic illustrations to Poe, Huysmans and Flaubert. All of the great pastels and oils are here, in full color, as well as lesser-known works like painted screens; throughout, each of the works is accompanied by the captions used in the exhibition, which provide details of provenance and, where relevant, edition size.

Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal “noirs,” luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of Modernism has had on both twentieth-century and contemporary artists.