Le Regard

Held in the Musée d'Orsay, 'Le Regard' (The Gaze) of 1910 belongs to the mature phase of Odilon Redon's colour period, after his definitive shift from the monochromatic 'noirs' of his early career to the luminous pastels and oils of his final decades. By 1910 Redon was widely celebrated: the 1900 Salon and subsequent retrospectives had established him as one of the foundational figures of Symbolism, and his influence on younger artists — Matisse had collected his work, the Nabis revered him — was immense. 'Le Regard' participates in the Symbolist tradition of the disembodied eye, a motif Redon had explored since his lithographic cycles of the 1880s. In colour, the gaze becomes something more radiant and ambiguous than in the earlier black-and-white works: the title's reference to 'looking' is now entangled with the experience of chromatic immersion, as if seeing and being seen are the same perceptual event.

Oil on canvas using Redon's distinctive late colour application: soft, blended passages of luminous tone without hard contours, building forms that emerge from colour fields rather than drawn lines. The characteristic indeterminacy of Redon's surfaces — forms that hover between identification and dissolution — is achieved through layered transparent glazes and subtle shifts of hue across large colour areas.