Odilon REDON

Biography

Odilon Redon, a Symbolist painter, draftsman, and printmaker, began producing his first charcoal drawings at the age of six. After studying architecture, he learned drawing and watercolor painting in the studio of the Bordeaux painter Stanislas Gorin. There, he became familiar with the works of Camille Corot, Gustave Moreau, and Jean-François Millet.

The engraver Rodolphe Bresdin (1822–1885) had a decisive influence on the artist by teaching him the secrets of etching. Under the master printmaker’s guidance, Redon created a series of eleven etchings entitled Le Gué (The Ford), printed in 1866, in an Orientalist and Romantic style inspired by Delacroix.

Naturalistic subjects, discovered through the work of the botanist and friend Armand Clavaud, also inspired Redon. He combined them with a dreamlike and fantastical universe, illustrating, among other things, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, as well as his own visions. In his first album of lithographs, entitled In Dreams (Dans le Rêve), he employed a technique known as “splash lithography.” Through the study of dreams, he revealed his unconscious and a world devoted to the exploration of the imagination.

In 1886, Odilon Redon took part in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition and, in 1888, in the first exhibition of painter-printmakers held at the gallery of Durand-Ruel.

The 1890s marked a period of transformation in Redon’s work. Having been exclusively a painter of black, he returned to color through the use of pastel, watercolor, and oil paint. These compositions evoke visions that transport us far from tangible reality. An article by Marius-Ary Leblond, published in La Revue Illustrée at Redon’s request, described the artist’s evolution in these terms: “Redon soon grew weary of that kind of spiraling, black hell in which he had confined himself [...] he felt the need for light and ascended toward color as one would toward paradise.”

In 1899, Maurice Denis introduced him to the Nabis group and, in 1900, portrayed him in Homage to Cézanne, now preserved at the Musée d’Orsay. Some of his large decorative panels, created with Maurice Denis for his friend and patron Robert de Domecy, are also housed today in the Musée d’Orsay.

Admired and supported by artists and intellectuals alike, he was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1904. That same year, an entire room was devoted to him at the Salon d’Automne, where sixty-two works were exhibited.

In 1913, the Armory Show presented forty of his works in New York, Chicago, and Boston as part of the International Exhibition of Modern Art.

Odilon Redon died in Paris in 1916. An oil painting on canvas, The Virgin, remained unfinished on his easel.