Odilon Redon

French

39 paintings in our database

Redon is one of the founders of Symbolist painting and one of the most original artistic personalities in the history of French art.

Biography

Bertrand Jean Redon, known as Odilon, was born on April 22, 1840, in Bordeaux. He received an unusually diverse formation: he studied drawing under Stanislas Gorin, then briefly under the sculptor Joseph-Isidore Dauzats, then botanical drawing under the botanist Armand Clavaud (who introduced him to the microscopic world of cells and spores), and finally etching and engraving under Rodolphe Bresdin. This combination of sources — natural science, fantasy illustration, and printmaking — shaped his unique vision.

For the first two decades of his mature career, Redon worked almost exclusively in black — charcoal drawings and lithographic albums (the 'Noirs') that depicted hallucinatory subjects: floating eyes, plant-creatures, human heads on stalks, the face of Edgar Allan Poe emerging from darkness. These images, exhibited from 1879, were championed by Huysmans and the Symbolist circle. His friendship with Mallarmé and Gauguin confirmed his place in the Symbolist orbit.

Around 1890, following the birth of his son, Redon made a dramatic turn toward color — pastels and oils of extraordinary chromatic intensity. Works like Closed Eyes (1889), Ophélie (1900), Saint Sébastien (1900), and Arbres sur un fond jaune (1901) reveal a joyful explosion of color that seems to reverse the monochrome of his earlier career. His flower paintings — Coquelicots (1885), vases of flowers in all combinations — became his best-known works in his lifetime. He died in Paris on July 6, 1916.

Artistic Style

Redon's mature style combines the dreamlike imagery of his symbolist 'Noirs' — floating heads, flowers with human faces, mythological hybrids — with a palette of extraordinary intensity and range. His pastels and oils deploy color independently of naturalistic function: blues that are simultaneously botanical and spiritual, reds and yellows of jewel-like saturation. Closed Eyes (1889) exemplifies his approach: a face of serene inner vision, the features soft and idealized, the surrounding space a rich blue-gold indefinite atmosphere.

His Autoportrait en buste (1876) is an unusually direct early self-portrait that shows his academic skill before the development of his signature Symbolist mode.

Historical Significance

Redon is one of the founders of Symbolist painting and one of the most original artistic personalities in the history of French art. His 'Noirs' established the possibility of a purely psychological, non-narrative imagery that prefigured Surrealism by several decades. André Breton claimed him as a precursor of the Surrealist unconscious. His influence on 20th-century art — through the Nabis (Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard who admired him) and the Surrealists — was enormous. The Musée d'Orsay holds a major collection of his work.

Things You Might Not Know

•Redon spent the first 40 years of his career working almost exclusively in black and white — charcoal drawings and lithographs he called his 'Noirs' — before switching to colour in his fifties, producing the intense pastels and oils he is now most famous for.
•He suffered from a severe, depressive personality disorder throughout his life and credited a late-life emotional resolution (around 1894) with his turn to joyful, luminous colour — his biography is unusually clearly divided into a dark period and a bright period.
•He befriended Stéphane Mallarmé and the Symbolist poets, who considered him the supreme visual equivalent of their literary aesthetic — the connection between his work and Symbolist literature was acknowledged by both sides.
•His flower paintings, produced in his sixties, are considered among the most technically accomplished pastels of any era — the intensity of his pinks, blues, and golds in these works was achieved through a unique layering technique.
•Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel 'À rebours' (1884), the bible of French Decadence, describes the protagonist's obsessive collection of Redon's lithographs — this fictional celebrity was a major boost to Redon's actual reputation.

Influences & Legacy

Shaped By

Eugène Delacroix — Redon admired Delacroix's Romantic colour and imagination; he visited the studio and the encounter was formative
Gustave Moreau — the Symbolist painter whose mythological visions and jewel-like surface Redon knew and absorbed
Rodolphe Bresdin — the eccentric graphic artist under whom Redon studied etching; Bresdin's fantastical, minutely detailed black-and-white imagery directly shaped Redon's early 'Noirs'
Goya — Redon studied Goya's Caprichos and Saturn extensively; the Spanish master's dark, fantastic imagery was a crucial precedent

Went On to Influence

The Nabis (Denis, Sérusier, Vuillard, Bonnard) — the young Nabis revered Redon as a master; Sérusier in particular mediated between Redon and the Pont-Aven circle
Surrealism — Redon's dreamlike, non-rational imagery was cited by the Surrealists as a direct precursor; André Breton considered him a proto-Surrealist
Marcel Proust — described Redon's flowers in 'In Search of Lost Time'; the connection between Redon and literary Symbolism was bidirectional