Odilon Redon: from the «Noirs» of Dream to an Explosion of Colour

Balloon-eyes, Flaubert and the Temptation of Saint Anthony, pastels and flowers: the visionary art of Odilon Redon, a leading figure of Symbolism.

For the first twenty years of his career Odilon Redon worked almost exclusively in black and white. Charcoals and lithographs peopled by giant eyes, smiling spiders and floating heads earned him a reputation as the painter of nightmare and dream. Then, around 1890, his work lit up with brilliant colours, flowers and mythological figures. This double path makes him one of the key figures of Symbolism and one of the artists most loved by the writers of his time.

Bordeaux, Bresdin and botany

Redon was born in Bordeaux in 1840 and spent his childhood on the family estate of Peyrelebade, in the Médoc, a landscape of heath and vineyards that remained a place of the soul for him. Two encounters proved decisive. The engraver Rodolphe Bresdin, an eccentric and solitary artist, taught him etching and the freedom of fantasy. The botanist Armand Clavaud introduced him to the microscope, the life of plants and the literature of ancient India.

The «noirs» and the invisible world

In 1879 Redon published his first lithographic album, In the Dream, followed by To Edgar Poe in 1882 and The Origins in 1883. In these plates appear an eye rising towards the sky like a hot-air balloon, plants with human faces, creatures halfway between embryo and monster. The images do not illustrate the texts but accompany them, creating a dialogue of suggestions.

Redon called these works his «noirs» and attributed an almost spiritual value to black, as the essential colour of the imagination. Between 1888 and 1896 he devoted three series of lithographs to Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the book in which the desert hermit is assailed by visions of gods, heresies and monsters. No subject was better suited to his way of giving form to the invisible.

Colour and light

From the 1890s Redon turned to pastel and oil, choosing vivid, luminous tones. He painted the Buddha, Orpheus, Pegasus, the chariot of Apollo, vases of flowers and female profiles immersed in coloured auras. In the painting Closed Eyes, of 1890, now in the Musée d'Orsay, a face emerges from the water with lowered eyelids, as if gathered in inner contemplation. It was among the first of his works bought by the French state.

Between 1900 and 1901 he decorated the dining room of the Château de Domecy, in Burgundy, with large panels of flowers and branches that seem to anticipate abstract art. Joris-Karl Huysmans had already celebrated him in the novel Against Nature, and the young painters of the Nabis group, including Maurice Denis, regarded him as a master and a forerunner.

A mystic without a doctrine

Redon joined no sect or initiatory order, but his work draws freely on Buddhism, Greek mythology, Christianity, natural science and fantastic literature. In his autobiographical writings, collected after his death in the volume To Myself, he described his art as an attempt to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, uniting exact observation of nature with the freedom of dream.

Dying in Paris in 1916, Redon left a body of work that the Surrealists would look at with great interest. The very synthesis of microscopic observation and inner vision, of the black of night and the colour of revelation, makes him one of the most modern painters of his century and an essential reference for anyone studying esotericism in art.