Self portrait, 1880, Musée d'Orsay.

Odilon Redon (April 22, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. photo of painting in the public domain This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... photo of painting in the public domain This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... Year 1880 (MDCCCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar). ... Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night Over the Rhone, painted in September 1888 at Arles Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, 1876 Édouard Manet: The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862-3 Gustave Courbet: The Artists Studio (detail), 1855 Paul Cézanne: Apples and Oranges, circa 1899... April 22 is the 112th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (113th in leap years). ... 1840 is a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... July 6 is the 187th day of the year (188th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 178 days remaining. ... 1916 (MCMXVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar). ... Symbolist painters were part of a 19th century movement in which art became infused with mysticism, and by the closely allied Symbolist movement in literature. ... Printmaking is a process for producing a work of art in ink; the work (called a print) is created indirectly, through the transfer of ink from the surface upon which the work was originally drawn or otherwise composed. ... This article or section cites very few or no references or sources. ... Location Administration Capital Bordeaux Regional President Alain Rousset (PS) (since 1998) Départements Dordogne Gironde Landes Lot-et-Garonne Pyrénées-Atlantiques Arrondissements 18 Cantons 235 Communes 2,296 Statistics Land area1 41,309 km² Population (Ranked 6th)  - January 1, 2005 est. ...

Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched 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 would later study there under Jean-Léon Gerôme. École des Beaux-Arts (IPA ) refers to several art schools in France. ... Jean-Léon Gérôme (May 11, 1824 - 1904) was a French painter and sculptor who produced many works in a historical, Orientalist style. ...

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. Christ Preaching, known as The Hundred Guilder print; etching c1648 by Rembrandt Etching is the process of using strong acid to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal (the original process - in modern manufacturing other chemicals may be used... Lithography stone and mirror-image print of a map of Munich. ... Combatants Second French Empire North German Confederation allied with south German states (later German Empire) Commanders Napoleon III Otto Von Bismarck, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder Strength 400,000 at the beginning of the war 1,200,000 Casualties 150,000 dead or wounded 284,000 captured 350,000 civilian...

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. 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. Joris-Karl Huysmans. ... À rebours (translated into English as Against the Grain or Against Nature) (1884) is a novel by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. ...

In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor.^{[citation needed]} 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. In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. Nabis (or Les Nabis; the prophets, from the Hebrew term for prophet) was a group of young post-impressionist avant-garde Parisian artists of the 1890s that influenced the fine arts and graphic arts in France at the turn of the 20th century. ... Paul Durand-Ruel (1831 – 1922) was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists. ... Medal for the officer class, decorated with a rosette Napoleon wearing the Grand Cross The President of France is the Grand Master of the Legion. ... NY redirects here. ... Armory Show poster. ...

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. View across garden, in new MoMA building by Yoshio Taniguchi. ... October 30 is the 303rd day of the year (304th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 62 days remaining. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... January 23 is the 23rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ...

Analysis of his work

Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Portrait of Violette Heymann, 1910. Pastels, 72 x 92 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

The mystery and the evocation of the drawings are described by Huysmans in the following passage: Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (831x1028, 213 KB)Photograph of Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, by Odilon Redon in the public domain. ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (831x1028, 213 KB)Photograph of Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, by Odilon Redon in the public domain. ... 1878 (MDCCCLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... On the western edge of Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois, is the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the premier art museums and schools in the United States, known especially for the extensive collection of impressionist and American art in its museum. ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2024x1550, 300 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Odilon Redon ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2024x1550, 300 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Odilon Redon ... 1910 (MCMX) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display calendar) of the Gregorian calendar or a common year starting on Sunday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar. ... The Cleveland Museum of Art, South View from Wade Lagoon Located in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, the Cleveland Museum of Art has a permanent collectionof more than 40,000 objects in 70 galleries. ...

"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.^[1]

As Huysmans notes, Redon was interested in a distinct perversion of the soul. He describes this more fully in a letter he wrote in 1871:

"But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos, if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face."^[2]

Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable: Comprachicos (also comprapequeños) is a compound Spanish word meaning child-buyers. The term refers to various groups in folklore who were said to change the physical appearance of human beings by manipulating growing children, in a similar way to the horticultural method of bonsai -- or through deliberate mutilation. ...

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."^[3]

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 being and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. The most 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:

"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."

References

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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Odilon Redon

• odilonredon.net - Online biography and pictures of Odilon Redon
• Artcyclopedia - Links to Redon's works
• The Athenaeum - Extensive list and images of Redon's works
• Web Museum - Biography and images of Redon's works
• MoMA Exhibition - "Beyond the Visible - The Art of Odilon Redon" - MoMA exhibition (October 2005 - January 2006)