Odilon Redon(fr. Odilon Redon, 1840 - 1916) - French painter, graphic artist, decorator, one of the founders of symbolism and the Society of Independent Artists.
He was worried about the deepest mysteries of existence - birth and death. Five years (1905-1910) - Odilon Redon worked on the painting "Green Death", where a terrible green snake, turning into a human figure, is ready to swallow a living, quivering fiery tongue. In 1910 the canvas appeared "Birth of Venus", on which a body appears in the flickering of a mother-of-pearl shell and the profile of the ancient goddess of beauty is about to appear, appearing as if from oblivion.
Natural forms became for Redon only the basis for his mystical, imaginative mixtures of sleep and reality, on the verge of which he created his own, sometimes frightening, sometimes bewitching world.
Odilon Redon was born on April 20, 1840 in Bordeaux. His childhood years were spent in dreamy solitude on the family estate of Peyrelbad. Fascinated by drawing, Redon began studying with local artist Goren. At the age of fifteen he was already painting watercolors and copying English engravings. The engraver Rodolphe Wreden had a huge influence on him.
For some time Redon studied at the Paris School of Fine Arts. He enthusiastically copied paintings by Eugene Delacroix in the Louvre. After finishing his studies, Redon lived in Bordeaux until he was thirty, and then settled permanently in Paris.
In 1878 his composition appeared "Spirit. Guardian of Waters", where a spirit marked in the sky with a black outline and a small sailboat wandering in the sea seem to embody the collision of the real world and the mystical world. In a series of lithographs "IN dream", which Redon created in 1879, he used coal as a material, allowing him to convey the entire gradation of tonal transitions. This series is a reflection on how weak a person is in the face of the world around him and constantly testing him.
The public saw Redon's works only in 1881, when his first personal exhibition took place. The artist was very sensitive to the life around him, was friends with the head of the Symbolist poets, Stéphane Mallarmé, and some of his graphic sheets and paintings are in tune with the literary and musical works created at that time. For example, "Crow"(1882) reminded contemporaries of Edgar Allan Poe's poem:
I just opened the shutters and went out
Raven of old,
Noisily straightening the mourning of his plumage.
Engraving appeared in 1891 "Persifal" the sound is close to the music of Richard Wagner in the opera of the same name. In progress "Profile of Light"(1881-1886) one gets the impression that the face of the knight, perhaps the same Percival, is illuminated through and through.
In the 1890s, Redon was friends with the artists of the Nabi group. At the same time, he became interested in pastels. In 1895, using this technique, he created one of his best works - "Christ of the Sacred Heart", where the image of Christ is born from the golden clear radiance of slightly blurred colors. Another one of my heroes - "Buddha"- in 1905, the artist depicted flowers and trees next to them appearing in colorful fabric.
Redon became increasingly popular. At the Autumn Salon of 1904 he was even given a separate hall. Mysterious and incomprehensible, similar to a living creature, written in 1910 by him "Red Sphere". Reminiscent of a decorated living fantasy "Woman Among Flowers"(1909 - 1910). At this time, Redon staged his last solo exhibition. Gradually, he began to move away from his painful, dream-like fantasies, painted still lifes, vases of flowers, next to which he often placed beautiful female profiles.
After his death, which overtook him on July 6, 1916, many paintings and graphic sheets remained unsolved to this day.
In my diary "To myself" Redon expressed thoughts that characterize his drawings, but can equally be attributed to the master’s work as a whole:
“My drawings suggest rather than define themselves. They don't determine anything. They send us, like music, into the dual world of the indefinable.” The main idea of these thoughts is about the powerlessness of precise, unambiguous expression, and, ultimately, about the powerlessness of the word before the depth of higher meanings.”
And she immediately plunges into the epicenter of problems about the essence of symbolism and the model of symbolic thinking presented in Redon’s work.
The Smiling Spider (c. 1881) Louvre, Paris
When looking at this spider, one immediately recalls the sensational novel by Joris Karl Huysmans “On the contrary” in its time, or rather the bedroom of Desesent, the main character of this work. As the reader probably remembers, it was decorated with a painting depicting a terrible spider with a human face. In addition, it is possible to assume that in “The Smiling Spider” Redon reflected not only his visions, but also his ideas about evolution. In the second half of the 19th century, the minds of Europeans were captured by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, according to which all forms of life on Earth are closely interconnected with each other, and higher organisms descended from lower ones. This theory suggested that in the course of evolution, Nature could create some “intermediate”, “hybrid” specimens, which later turned out to be non-viable. In the light of such assumptions, a spider with a human face did not seem so fantastic. Let us add that Redon’s imagination could also be spurred on by “monsters from a microscope,” since the passion for the microscope was widespread in those years (suffice it to say that in 1860, in one of the Bordeaux cafes, performances were held - and enjoyed great success - during which spectators looked at a drop of water under a microscope). As for the Redon spider, it frightens not so much by its “anthropomorphy” as by its size (this can be judged by the size of the floor tiles). The “head” of the spider resembles severed heads, often found in other “blacks” of the hero of our issue.
“The sleep of the mind gives birth to monsters”... However, in the case of Odilon Redon, it was the waking mind, more precisely, the never-sleeping part of it, called the subconscious, that unknown area where the most terrible monsters are born and exist, became the source of his artistic nightmares, or, if you like , inspiration.
"New Tremors"
“In art, nothing is achieved by willpower alone. Everything is done through obedient submission to the subconscious,” said Redon and followed this law all his life.
Now his name (1840–1916) is little known to the general public. He worked during the time of the Impressionists, was personally acquainted with many of them, but stood apart and did not consider himself an impressionist. “I refused to sail on the ship of the Impressionists - they seemed too narrow-minded to me,” he said. However, the impressionists paid him in the same coin.
The fact is that Redon did not seek to recreate images that would correspond to true reality. No, this artist was perhaps the only one in that turbulent time of the dominance of naturalism and rationalism who created works that explored the secrets of the mind, both tormented and serene, dissected with a brush the secrets of madness and sought to comprehend the beyond, what was on the other side of physical reality.
He clothed the monsters of the human subconscious in living flesh and opened a hidden door for them into our reality, populating it with monsters, nomads, creepy phantoms, and hybrids. He created "unfrissonnouveau" - a new trembling.
What kind of artistic vision did this mysterious and little-understood artist have? Perhaps metaphysical, since he always maintained that his drawings were true, and that the fantastic creatures and demonic visions he created belonged to a world that was never completely divorced from reality. “I endow human life on improbable beings, forcing them to live according to the laws of verisimilitude and putting ... the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.”
This worked well for him, since the objects of his nightmares were things that he actually saw with his mind's eye. He could capture the invisible and unknown with precise strokes of his brush.
Real-surreal aesthetics
Few artists' creative life would be so clearly divided into black and white and color periods, as was Redon's.
His fame began precisely with black drawings made in charcoal. With the help of a sophisticated play of shadows with light, he sought to stimulate thought and the desire for introspection in the audience. Belief in the existence of magical inner vision led him to create paintings whose phantasmagoric motifs resemble fragments, or rather, fragments of crazy dreams - terrible coal-black nightmares in which the human body has undergone terrible metamorphoses, truncated to the head or even reduced to just one eye, which unfolds into a metaphor for the world, and then into the world itself.
This series of “nightmares” from Redon includes an image of a raven, the messenger of death, against the backdrop of an open window (in general, an open window always symbolized death and often served as the background for posthumous portraits, when a dead person was painted), a drawing with the telling title “In the Depths” our dreams”, other drawings – “Caliban on a branch”, “Skeleton”, “Strange flower”, etc.
Redon had a special passion for eyes and spiders. Smiling or crying spiders combine all conceivable phobias of humanity - from vampirism and castration to cannibalism.
Huge eyes, intently examining the viewer, appear just as often in Redon’s works and also carry a special meaning. Thus, a drawing depicting one eye, which is also a balloon gondola, or an egg with a face on a stand, symbolizes the nightmare of a claustrophobe.
In general, since childhood, the artist was tormented by frequent attacks of anxiety and melancholy, and all these fears subsequently found their artistic reflection in his works. Redon, like no one else, could depict the horror that lurks within us.
"Notes of Joy"
In the second half of his life, Redon suddenly turned to color, color painting. Such a sharp turn in creativity baffles art historians. What shift in the psyche made the dark surreal mystic Redon turn his gaze to the riot of natural colors?
Some researchers are inclined to see the reason for the appearance of polychrome painting by Redon in the fact that he allegedly “reconciled himself with realism.” Others believe that the artist “rushed to flowers as to a lost paradise.”
Redon himself explained the turn in his painting absolutely “in the Redon way”: “I realized that, gradually unwinding, the ribbon of life gives us not only sadness, but also joy. If the artist’s work is a song about his life, then in addition to the sad black and white notes, at least some colorful notes of joy should sound in it.”
However, being carried away by colors and floristry, Redon remained himself. He really enjoyed painting still lifes. However, if you take a closer look at its flowers, it turns out that they are mostly fictional, and not truly realistic, with their pistils and stamens. And the further you look at Redon’s color paintings, the more obvious it becomes that his sophisticated color pastels contain much more surreal and unearthly than in other modern fantasy films. Some of his color paintings are, in fact, continuations of black and white nightmares.
Redon's color paintings on religious themes are stunning. The artist, who so selflessly painted eyes on stalks, monster plants with faces emerging through the leaves and smiling spiders, could also create surreal icons, full of light and warmth.
Horizons of the mysterious
The inevitable and the otherworldly always guided Redon’s hand. He knew how to give credibility to ephemeral dreams and tormenting nightmares.
He lived in a world of mysterious and restless visions, inseparable from reality. Since these visions and dreams were a true reality for him, the artist did not bother to reveal their meaning, but sought to express them with the most sensual colors or the strongest and most sophisticated contrasts of black and white.
In his diary, he wrote: “To paint means to create a beautiful substance, resorting to a special, inner feeling. In exactly the same way, nature creates diamond, gold, sapphire... This is an innate gift. It cannot be purchased."
Indeed, Redon became an exceptional master, having, with the exception of Goya, neither predecessors nor rivals. Even his militant critics and almost enemies, such as Octave Mirbeau, a comrade-in-arms of the super-rationalist and naturalist Emile Zola, an ardent admirer of the Impressionists and the author of scathing notes about Redon, eventually admitted his defeat in front of the unreal art of Redon: “Today I admire you more, than any other artist: not one of them opened to my soul such luminous, distant and painful horizons of the mysterious, which is the only real life.”
Marina Sotnikova
Odilon Redon is a French symbolist artist of the 19th century. The work of this artist can be mentally divided into two periods: “black” and “color”; it would be logical to assume that this distribution concerns not only the color solutions used by the author, but also characterizes the general mood.
Just as Picasso had a blue period of sorrow and melancholy, so Odilon, in a state of turmoil and sadness, created his paintings with pencil and charcoal. Although it is officially classified as symbolism, many art historians identify some other direction in the context of symbolism - irrealism. This is not abstraction or surreal, as we might assume, but something in between, anticipatory. So to speak, the evolving stage of development is a bridge between styles.
« David and Goliath»
"Old Knight", Lithograph
Redon devotes his black period almost entirely to the work of Francisco Goya. It may be rash to say so, but still the similarity of moods and compositional solutions is so great that it would not seem possible to emphasize their kinship otherwise. The same witchcraft-mystical images, in harsh and cold colors, gloomy and romantically melancholy in the medieval style, they do not burst into consciousness, but slowly but purposefully penetrate into its hidden corners, filling the entire space there with their vague shadows.
Odilon very sensitively feels the mood of the images; his delicate, pastel works of the color period, for all their liveliness, compared to black and white, still retain pessimistic notes.
"Ophelia"
His beautiful Ophelia, in her madness, is buried in flowers, tender, but at the same time so alarming. These fuzzy lines, which would seem to add romance, on the contrary, maintain a certain dramatic tension. The feeling that something must definitely happen now does not leave the viewer.
Odilon Redon anticipated innovations in painting; he anticipated modernist trends, laying the first stones in the development of a new vision of images.
Redon Odilon is a French painter, graphic artist, art critic, considered one of the founders of symbolism as a movement in art. Coming from an aristocratic family, Redon was born on April 22, 1840 in Bordeaux.
Odilon Redon: biography
Redon has been interested in drawing since childhood. The works of the 10-year-old master brought him fame in his immediate circle, and at the age of 15 the young man began to study drawing professionally (mastering watercolor techniques and copying English engravings), under the guidance of local artist Stanislav Goren. Then he studied for some time in Jerome's workshop in Paris.
Redon Odilon was an extremely suspicious person; he did not believe in his own talent, which contributed to his weak popularity. There was a case when in 1868 one of his paintings was approved by the commission of the Paris Salon, but at the last moment the artist got scared of something and took the work away.
In Paris
Redon Odilon was positively influenced by his military service (1870) and participation in the Franco-Prussian War: the missing confidence appeared in the young man’s character. The work of Leonardo da Vinci, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya and Jean Baptiste, as well as acquaintance and communication with the famous graphic artist Rodolphe Bredin, had a huge influence on the further determination of the Frenchman’s life path. After the war, Odilon Redon permanently moved to Paris, where he began to engage in charcoal drawings and lithography.
These black and white works (“blacks” - as the painter himself called them) were published in small series: “The Apocalypse of St. John”, “In a Dream”, “Origins”, “To Edgar Poe”, “Night”, “To Gustave Flaubert” , “Flowers of Evil”, “In Honor of Goya”, “Dreams”, “Temptations” (1879-1896).
The fantastic world of Odilon
Redon Odilon's work was greatly influenced by his friendship with the botanist Armano Clavo, who studied the relationship between animals and plants. The French painter was fiercely interested in the idea of the animation of all nature and the sensitivity of plants. A dreamer par excellence, who embodied phantasmagoric and spiritual images in painting and graphics, Redon Odilon drew and painted a lot from life. First of all, the works of the talented master reflected the creations of his imagination: a player with a huge figure on his shoulders, or plants with a human eye and head. The artist’s graphics displayed images of world evil, the most striking of which was the image of a spider with a human, evilly smiling appearance.
Odilon Redon: paintings
Since the 1890s, the painter increasingly turned to color, oil paints and pastels, painted the walls of monasteries and villas with glue paint, made cardboard for tapestries and decorated screens. His work is centered around the central motifs of the ghostly world, be it an eye, a boat, a flower, or a human face that has become a “face”. Or the motive of the birth of living beings, with whose arrival the world is filled with suffering, anger, envy, greed and death.
Among the characteristic works one can highlight the work “Cyclops” (1898), “Black Vase with Flowers” (1909), “Woman Among Flowers” (1909), “Birth of Venus” (1910). His paintings of 1900-1910 are more characterized by images of bouquets in vases and women among flowers. Redon Odilon saturates his works with light, makes them burn and strives to find a form of artistic expression that can awaken in the viewer a desire to think and analyze.
The artist also turned to ancient subjects. The birth of Venus in the painting of the same name seems to take place before the viewer’s eyes: like a burst of life-giving energy, the goddess appears from the sea foam.
Odilon Redon often acted as a critic in print, reproaching the Impressionists and late Romantics for depicting what was happening inside man himself. He believed that inner fantasies would be convincing only if they followed the “laws of life.”
The French artist staged the largest exhibition in his entire career in 1913, as part of the New York Armory Show in New York.
