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Odilon Redon |
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Odilon Redon |
Art Encyclopedia:
Odilon (Bertrand-Jean) Redon |
(b Bordeaux, 20 April 1840; d Paris, 6 July 1916). French printmaker, draughtsman and painter. He spent his childhood at Peyrelebade, his father's estate in the M?doc. Peyrelebade became a basic source of inspiration for all his art, providing him with both subjects from nature and a stimulus for his fantasies, and Redon returned there constantly until its enforced sale in 1897. He received his education in Bordeaux from 1851, rapidly showing talent in many art forms: he studied drawing with Stanislas Gorin (?1824-?1874) from 1855; in 1857 he attempted unsuccessfully to become an architect; and he also became an accomplished violinist. He developed a keen interest in contemporary literature, partly through the influence of Armand Clavaud, a botanist and thinker who became his friend and intellectual mentor.
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Biography:
Odilon Redon |
The French painter and graphic artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was a leading symbolist and a forerunner of surrealism.
Odilon Redon was born on April 20, 1840, in Bordeaux. His father was a rich French colonist in the southern United States; his mother, of French descent, was from New Orleans. Odilon lived on his uncle's estate in Peyrelebade until 1851, and he spent summers there from 1874 to 1897.
Redon began to study drawing in 1855 with Stanislas Gorin in Bordeaux. At his father's wish Redon started to study architecture in 1860. Four years later he was accepted in the painting class of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He exhibited some prints in the Salon of 1867. During 1870-1871 he served in the Franco-Prussian War.
In 1878 Redon visited Belgium and the Netherlands, studied the works of Rembrandt, and learned from Henri Fantin-Latour the technique of lithography. He produced his first lithographic series, In the Dream, in 1879; his second, For Edgar Allan Poe, in 1882; and his third, The Origins, in 1883. In 1884 Redon became known in avant-garde literary circles through J. K. Huysman's symbolist novel Against the Grain, in which Huysman said Redon's drawings "were outside of any known category; most of them leap beyond the boundaries of painting, innovating a very special fantasy, a fantasy of sickness and delirium." That same year Redon exhibited in the first Salon des Indépendants, which he had helped to create.
Redon's next lithographic series were Homage to Goya in 1885 and The Night in 1886. He exhibited with the impressionists in Paris and with "The Twenty" in Brussels in 1886. He did three series of lithographs for Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony - 1888, 1889, 1896 - and a series for Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal in 1890.
Not until 1890 did Redon produce his first pastels and oils. At this time he replaced Paul Gauguin as a mentor of the young Nabis. The lithographic series Dreams was produced in 1891, and his last series, the Revelation of St. John, in 1899. Redon also produced some fine portraits, decorative screens, and wall ornaments, and he executed designs for tapestries.
In 1900 Redon began a series of flower studies, turning away from the macabre subjects and nightmare visions of his black-and-white lithographs and drawings to paint in the most voluptuous colors, as in Flowers in a Vase (ca. 1905) and Vase with Anemones (1912-1914). He was more fully represented at the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City than any other artist. He died in Paris on July 6, 1916.
Further Reading
The outstanding work on Redon in English is Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon: Fantasy and Colour (1964). An earlier work is Walter Pach, Odilon Redon (1913). The definitive book on Redon's graphics is André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (1913; repr. 1968), the text of which is in French. Redon is discussed in John Rewald, Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin (2d ed. 1962).
Additional Sources
Cassou, Jean, Odilon Redon, Deurne-Anvers: Plantyn, 1974.
Eisenman, Stephen, The temptation of Saint Redon: biography, ideology, and style in the Noirs of Odilon Redon, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Hobbs, Richard, Odilon Redon, London: Studio Vista, 1977.
Redon, Odilon, To myself: notes on life, art, and artists, New York: G. Braziller, 1986.
French Literature Companion:
Odilon Redon |
Redon, Odilon (1840-1916). French artist, best known for the series of charcoals and lithographs (1879-88) whose fantastic subjects explore relationships between natural and human forms. His imaginative interpretation of the work of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Poe made Redon one of the heroes of the Decadent movement following the description of his work in Huysmans's A rebours (1884).
— James Kearns
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Odilon Redon |
Bibliography
See his journal, À Soi-Même (1922); Graphic Works (tr. 1913, repr. 1969); studies by K. Berger (1965), J. Selz (1971), and S. F. Eisenman (1992).
Wikipedia:
Odilon Redon |
| Odilon Redon | |
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| Self-Portrait, 1880, Musée d'Orsay | |
| Birth name | Bertrand-Jean Redon |
| Born | 20 April 1840 Bordeaux, France |
| Died | 6 July 1916 (aged 76) Paris, France, |
| Field | painting, engraving, drawing |
| Training | Átelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme |
| Movement | Post-Impressionism, Symbolism |
Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French Symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.
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Odilon Redon (pronounced o dee lawn r'dawn) was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine to a prosperous family. The young Bertrand-Jean Redon acquired the nickname "Odilon" from his mother, Odile.[1] Redon started drawing as a child, and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. Aged fifteen, he began the formal study of drawing, but on the insistence of his father he changed to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864.
Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.
At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings.
In the 1890s, pastel and oils became his favored media, and he produced no more noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor.[2] His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.
Redon died on July 6, 1916. In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio's papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006. [3]
The mystery and the evocation of the drawings are described by Huysmans in the following passage:
Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:
Redon's work represent an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to "place the visible at the service of the invisible"; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:
 Spirit of the Forest, 1880. |
 Cactus Man, 1881. |
 The Crying Spider, 1881. |
 Saint John, 1892. |
 Lady of the Flowers, c. 1890-95, Honolulu Academy of Arts |
 Flower Clouds, 1903, The Art Institute of Chicago. |
 The Buddha, 1904. |
 Coquille, 1912. |
 The Cyclops, 1914, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands |
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