Odilon Redon | Symbolism, Spiritualism, Fantasy

Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist painter.

Born in Bordeaux in 1840, Redon was a sickly child, and brought up by his uncle until the age of 11. A lonely childhood created a fertile imagination, providing a background to his early works. He took drawing lessons as a youth but was pushed to take up architecture by his father. However, on failing the entrance exams he returned his focus to art. In Paris he met the Armand Clavaud, who would introduce him to the spiritual side of life including Buddhism and Hinduism, which would have a profound influence on Redon and his paintings.

He worked briefly under the classical artist Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris, but baulked at the requirements of realist painting. Returning to Bordeaux in 1865, Redon met and studied with the artist Rodolphe Bresdin, an original whose free approach to art, and interest in the spiritual, suited Redon far better.

To understand Redon’s views of these contrasting experiences, we can turn to his own diary:

“I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before 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”

After serving in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71, Redon moved to Paris and began working in charcoal and lithography. The prints he created he called his ‘Noirs’. These were strange and often nightmarish visions, often with a theme taken from religious texts or classical mythology.

During the 1870s Redon was a part of the group of Symbolist writers and artists in Paris that centred around the poet Stephen Mallarmé. Here he met the novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans, who became a collector and champion of Redon’s work. In Huysmans’ 1884 novel, À Rebours (Against Nature), the decadent protagonist collects the works of Redon. The descriptions of Redon’s paintings and etchings in the novel - “inconceivable apparitions”, “a fantasy that was unique, the fantasy of a diseased and delirious mind” - brought the artist to wider public attention.

Redon took part in the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 along with other artists who would follow the Impressionists, including Gauguin (who had exhibited with them before), and the Pointilists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Redon’s fame grew through the 1900s, so that he was a well known artist by the time fo his death.

The bold and bright colours of Redon’s paintings were influenced by Japonism and by the Nabis, a group of French postimpressionist painters united by their use of bright, unnatural colours, as well as similar subject matter to that which inspired Redon. He was introduced to them through a friendship with Paul Gauguin.

Odilon Redon died in 1916 at the age of 76.
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Music

Starlight Tale by Keys of Moon Music
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