Odilon Redon was one of the most mysterious late developers in the history of modern art.
Not only did his drawings, lithographs and, eventually, paintings seem to exist in a world removed from 19th Century art in France, but he, too, appeared as an outsider who, even after achieving fame in his 60s, maintained a distance from others, keeping details on much of his life unknown.
“I have made an art according to myself,” Redon wrote. And it was the same with his image. Seventy-eight years since his death, we still see him as he wanted to be seen, as a man who created himself from nothing, suffered on the fringe of an uncomprehending society and, at last, received tribute for standing alone.
The source for most of this was “To Myself,” a collection of Redon’s writings that appeared posthumously, in 1922. Nearly every monograph on the artist has drawn upon it for biographical information, and a good deal of it is true. But Redon and, later, his widow left out a lot that did not conform to the image of isolated genius, meaning we know him even less than we once supposed.
That will change this week, with the opening Saturday of “Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams,” the exhibition of more than 180 pieces organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with museums in Amsterdam and London. It is the artist’s largest and most significant retrospective since the one in 1957 in Paris and the first Redon show anywhere to benefit from much new information on his life and works.
Taken together with its 464-page catalog, the exhibition, on view through Sept. 18, will provide the most complete view yet of a strange figure whose influence on 20th Century art has been at once quiet and second to none.
Redon was born in 1840-the same year as Claude Monet-to a couple who had met and married in Louisiana, where the husband made a fortune in the lumber business before returning to France and settling not far from his once-rich family, in Bordeaux.
The first son, Felix, was his mother’s favorite and remained with her until his death 72 years later. Some of Odile Redon’s influence over her second son perhaps is apparent from how he was named and baptized after the father, Bertrand Jean, but ever after was called-and called himself-Odilon.
Immediately after baptism, Redon’s mother sent him to a wet nurse. He did not return to the family in Bordeaux, however, until many years later. An elderly uncle watched him grow to school age on a declining country estate at Peyrelebade.
This was the first of Redon’s many mysteries. He wrote he had been sent away because of ill health, but only now has the cause become known. Redon apparently showed symptoms of epilepsy, an affliction thought a social stigma, and the parents isolated him until several pilgrimages to the basilica of Verdelais resulted in a “miraculous” cure.
Life at Peyrelebade gave Redon the melancholy, death-haunted temperament that marked him for decades. Even a year spent in Paris, where he started to attend museums, did not affect his gloom, as he later wrote the paintings impressed him with only “the excessive violence of life.”
After his last visit to Verdelais, at age 11, Redon finally entered school. The change from isolation to the company of other children did not give comfort either. He wrote: “This period is the saddest and most distressing of my youth.” Only his first communion and the music he heard in church provided a taste of the exaltation he would find in art.
Eventually, to please his father, Redon agreed to study architecture but failed the entrance exam and took up sculpture instead. Then he returned to Paris to work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under neoclassical painter Leon Gerome, who “tortured” him by insisting he draw from models when he “preferred to attempt representations of imaginary things.”
Armand Clavaud, a botanist, already had nurtured Redon’s inner life by introducing him to the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allan Poe. Works by such authors, read soon after publication, fired Redon’s Romantic spirit, making him profoundly dissatisfied with an art of observation and natural appearance.
He thus rejected Gerome and the Ecole, turning to the eccentric Rodolphe Bresdin, who lived in virtual destitution near Bordeaux. Bresdin transformed appearance through imagination in meticulously detailed prints and drawings. He also introduced Redon to the prints of Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt, which were tremendous sources of inspiration, confirming in him a need to use black and white as primary means of expression.
“All my originality,” Redon wrote, “consists in giving human life to unlikely creatures according to the laws of probability, while, as much as possible, putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.”
This approach set him apart from the Impressionists, with whom he exhibited early charcoal drawings. The creatures who populated his works-winged heads, giant eyeballs, melancholy demons, smiling spiders-arose from what Redon called “the subjective world” and had no correspondence with the Impressionists’ fidelity to nature.
Redon’s creatures began to appear in series of lithographs in 1879, arousing little immediate interest. But two small drawing shows in 1881 and 1882 attracted writers who had rebelled against naturalism in literature. Such writers, known as Decadents, saw in Redon a kindred spirit who created, in the words of Joris-Karl Huysmans, “a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.”
The artist opposed such interpretations on the grounds they were moral rather than aesthetic. But he also played into the hands of the writers by adding captions and prose-poem commentaries to his lithographs that seemed to confirm the literary associations he otherwise denied.
Finally recognized at age 40, Redon nonetheless attempted to disassociate himself from his champions by stressing the visual and physical properties of his work over its fantastic content. Different media exercised different influences over artists, he wrote, and the resulting effects were more important in creating an art of suggestion rather than meaning.
Until this time, Redon created only charcoals and lithographs, the pieces he called his “blacks,” as black was for him “the agent of the spirit.” But in the 1890s he became acquainted with a group of young painters who for the first time gave him an appreciation of color as an expressive element rather than a means of natural description.
Redon’s use of color in pastels and paintings coincided with a new optimism in subject matter, perhaps indicating the “blacks” had a cathartic as well as aesthetic purpose. The 1897 sale of the family house at Peyrelebade, scene of his early suffering, marked the last stage in this exorcism, with Redon’s son Ari eventually writing that it came as “a sort of deliverance.”
The artist now had enthusiastic support of mystical writers and painters known as Symbolists, who identified their aims with his just as the Decadents had done. And, again, Redon resisted, once more setting himself apart in his writings from all avant-garde movements by declaring, “The individual soars only in liberty.”
This last association was, however, more difficult to cast off. And well after the French state recognized him with an award and a purchase of one of his works when Redon was in his 60s, he continued to carry the Symbolist taint of mysticism and literary expression, persisting even to this day.
Still, the pieces he created after 1900 gradually moved from myth and the pretext it gave for vivid coloristic expression to the world of appearances he so steadfastly had resisted. In fact, Redon drew his final flower pastels from plants growing in his garden, finally accepting that mystery could arise from natural subject matter.
He admired the work of Pierre Bonnard and, in turn, gained the admiration of Henri Matisse, another young painter enthralled with color. And just as Redon’s early nightmares passed through the Symbolists to influence Surrealism, so did his late joyousness come down through Matisse to impact upon the so-called Pattern Painters of the 1970s.
He has been with us more than we’ve known.
