Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon

Self-Portrait, 1880, Musée d'Orsay
Birth name Bertrand-Jean Redon
Born 20 April 1840(1840-04-20)
Bordeaux, France
Died 6 July 1916(1916-07-06) (aged 76)
Paris, France,
Field Painting, engraving, drawing
Training Átelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme
Movement Post-impressionism, symbolism

Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.

Contents

Life

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, to a prosperous family. The young Bertrand-Jean Redon acquired the nickname "Odilon" from his mother, Odile.[1] Redon started drawing as a child, and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. Aged fifteen, he began the formal study of drawing, but on the insistence of his father he changed to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.)

Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings.

In the 1890s, pastel and oils became his favored media, and he produced no more noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor.[2] His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.

Redon died on July 6, 1916. In 1923 Mellerio published: Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio's papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.[3]

Analysis of his work

Portrait of Violette Heymann, 1910. Pastels, 72 x 92 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

The mystery and the evocation of the drawings are described by Huysmans in the following passage:

"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium."[4]

Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."[5]

Redon's work represent an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to "place the visible at the service of the invisible"; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."

Selected works

See also

References

  1. ^ Online Essay on Odilon Redon
  2. ^ Redon and Werner (1969), p. ix.
  3. ^ Danielle O'Steen (November 2005). Dark Dreamer. ART + AUCTION. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/1458/dark-dreamer/. Retrieved 2008-05-20 
  4. ^ Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1998). Against Nature. Translated by Margaret Mauldon, Oxford University Press. pp. 52–53. ISBN 0140440860. 
  5. ^ Goldwater, Robert; Marco Treves, Marco (1945). Artists on Art. Pantheon. pp. 360. ISBN 0394709004. 

Bibliography

External links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужен реферат?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Odilon Redon — Odilon Redon: Selbstporträt, 1880, Öl auf Leinwand, Musée d Orsay, Paris …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Odilon Redon — Pour les articles homonymes, voir Redon.  Ne doit pas être confondu avec Odile Redon. Odilon Redon …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Odilon Redon — Autorretrato, 1880, Museo de Orsay. Odilon Redon (20 de abril de 1840 – 6 de julio de 1916) fue un pintor simbolista, nacido en Burdeos, Aquitania, Francia. Es considerado un pintor postimpresionista, dentro de la corriente del …   Wikipedia Español

  • REDON (O.) — Que l’imaginaire et le rêve soient, pour l’art, de plus d’importance que la représentation de la nature à la manière des impressionnistes, ses comtemporains, tel est le message que nous laisse Redon. Cet artiste, discret et réservé, se donnait… …   Encyclopédie Universelle

  • Redon (Begriffsklärung) — Redon steht für: Redon, eine Stadt im französische Département Ille et Vilaine in der Bretagne, davon abgeleitet Arrondissement Redon Kanton Redon Redon (Fluss), mündet bei Séchex in den Genfersee Name des illyrischen Gotts der Wanderer und… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Redon (disambiguation) — Redon may refer to: *Redon (king), a legendary king of the Britons referred to by Geoffrey of Monmouth *Redon, Ille et Vilaine, a town in Brittany, France *Odilon Redon, a Symbolist painter …   Wikipedia

  • Redon, Odilon — born April 20, 1840, Bordeaux, Fr. died July 6, 1916, Paris French painter, lithographer, and etcher. He studied under Jean Léon Gérome and learned lithography under Henri Fantin Latour. He came to be associated with the Symbolist painters. His… …   Universalium

  • Odilon — Cette page d’homonymie répertorie les différents sujets et articles partageant un même nom. Odilon est un prénom masculin de la même origine qu Odile, Odon, Othon ou Odette, basé sur le thème germanique ot / od, signifiant propriété, héritage.… …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Redon (homonymie) — Cette page d’homonymie répertorie les différents sujets et articles partageant un même nom. Sommaire 1 Toponymes 2 Patronymes 3 …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Odilon — Not to be confused with Odilo. For the feminine form of this name, see Odile (given name). Odilon Gender Masculine Language(s) French Other names Related names …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”