MONSTERS AND MELANCHOLY
Curatorial Essay for the The Enchanted: Odilon Redon, Master Prints exhibition at Gippsland Art Gallery.
Odilon Redon (1840—1916) was born Bertrand Jean Redon to a wealthy French family. A sensitive and introspective child, he spent his hours observing the landscape around him and discovering that books, pictures and music allowed his imagination to flourish. As a young man Redon studied painting, architecture and sculpture, learning etching and lithography from Rodolphe Bresdin (1), before serving in the Franco-Prussian War—a horror and tragedy that played its part in turning the young Redon into the artist we know today. After the War, he resumed working in charcoal and lithography, creating his dark symbolist artworks, his noirs. Since his creations before the War, his works in this medium had “grown finer and bolder, the blacks richer and deeper, the whites more and more luminous.” (2)
“Black is the most essential of all colours...it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health...one must admire black.” (3)
—Odilon Redon
Redon produced most of his 30 etchings and 170 lithographs between 1870 and 1900, after which he moved on to embrace colour and pastels, earning him the attention of the Impressionists. As a predecessor to Surrealism, Redon delved deeply into the imagination and dreams, drawing inspiration from literature, old legends, mythology and Biblical tales. (4) His works are populated with monsters and melancholy, death and discovery. The simplicity of the works shown in this exhibition, often with single figures or objects draped in black, encourages the viewer to add their own dreams and interpretations to the work. Redon, often inspired by literature, titled his works poetically. He preferred the mysterious, stating “a title is justified only when it is vague, indeterminate, and even intentionally ambiguous.” (5)
Redon’s work has entranced viewers for over 100 years, in part due to the suggestiveness of his art. Rather than giving the viewer the whole story, he asks you to participate in the work, decide for yourself why the floating eye in Everywhere eyeballs are aflame is on fire, or what exactly the mythic creature is afraid of in The Chimera gazed at all things with fear. What do the multiple devils want from us? What does the Druid Priestess pray for?
1 Colta Feller Ives, “French Prints in the Era of Impressionism and Symbolism”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v.46, no.1 (Summer, 1988): 24.|
2 Alfred Werner, “Introduction to the Dover Edition”, The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon (United States: Dover Publications Inc, 1969, reprinted in 2005), 11.
3 Odilon Redon quote taken from Alfred Werner, “Introduction to the Dover Edition”, The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon (United States: Dover Publications Inc, 1969, reprinted in 2005), 10.
4 Redon, MoMA, 2005, accessed January 29, 2019, https://www.moma.org/ interactives/exhibitions/2005/redon/redon.html.
5 Nathalie Strasser, “114. Odilon Redon”, Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Stijn Alsteens, Carmen Bambach, George Goldner, Colta Ives, Parrin Stein and Collection of Jean Bonna (New York: The Metropolitian Museum of Art), 258.
