Fantasmagorie

The year listed for this 'Fantasmagorie' — 2000 — is certainly a cataloguing error; the work is painted on cardboard and stylistically belongs to Redon's post-1890s colour period. 'Fantasmagorie' as a title belongs to a tradition of supernatural spectacle that stretches back to the early nineteenth-century phantasmagoria shows — magic lantern projections of ghosts and monsters that thrilled theatre audiences across Europe. For Redon, the word had a specific personal resonance: his entire early graphic output was described by critics and by himself as 'la fantaisie noire', a darkly fantastical art of invented beings and uncanny spaces. A 'Fantasmagorie' in colour marks his transformation of that early vision from black-and-white strangeness to chromatic wonder. The Musée d'Orsay holds this as part of the comprehensive documentation of Redon's imaginative world.

Oil on cardboard using Redon's mature colour fantasy technique: imagined forms emerge from layered colour fields without precise definition, suggesting rather than depicting. The palette is likely intense — purples, golds, and greens associated with his visionary colour works — applied in transparent layers that build atmospheric depth. Forms hover between identification and dissolution, maintaining the productive ambiguity central to his symbolic method.