Odilon Redon 1840-1916

Bertrand-Jean Redon was born to a French father and Creole mother in Bordeaux. The name Odilon, by which he was commonly known, derived from his mother’s name Odile. The family were prosperous, having built up successful business interests in America.

Redon always showed an interest in drawing and won his first prize at the age of ten. The majority of his childhood was spent on his uncle’s estate near Peyrelebad in the Medoc, and he spent many hours observing nature, and running wild with the local children while absorbing their tales of witches and folklore prevalent in the area.

From the age of fifteen he studied drawing with the artist Stanislas Gorin, who taught him the principles of Romantic art i.e. to make every line express both sensibility and form, rejecting all rules and formulae.

His father wanted Redon to study architecture, however this was brought to a swift halt when Redon failed his entrance examination at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts 1857. Back home he began to study sculpture, and was also introduced to etching and lithography by Rodolphe Bresnin who was to become a close friend and mentor 1863. In 1864 he was finally accepted to the Beaux Arts to study painting, however, he rebelled against the establishmentarian values he found and turned away from the formal art world, into almost certain obscurity.

Redon turned to his friend Bresnin for guidance, who introduced him to the work of Durer and Rembrandt, and taught him to transform nature through imagination. Redon turned to graphic art, principally in black and white which he referred to as his “noirs”. The subject matter was often both fantastic and disturbing, using a cross-section of references, and show elements of Surrealism, a movement which was to surface later, and of which he was critical. The deep tones of the layered charcoal, built up with layers of fixative, have an almost sumptuous quality, which, like all his work, provides a feast for the senses although the subjects may be macabre and unfamiliar.

Link to NY MoMA Redon collection here - this has a good selection of his work which can be viewed clearly

Recent research by the American Institute of Conservation (article here ) has helped to identify various media used in the noirs, which has subsequently allowed better dating of his work. Primarily, Redon used vine charcoal, sometimes soaked in oil, which gave a brown-black tone as the oil worked into the paper surface. Later he also used forms of compressed charcoal and a type of black chalk, exploring new blacks as they became available to him. He preferred to use a balsam-based fixative which discoloured to a warm yellow tone and which he exploited, similarly using toned papers, so that in fact the “Noirs” do contain elements of colour. Redon himself stated that he always used coloured paper for all his Noirs, and that they should not be referred to as black and white for this reason. He also saturated the back of each piece with fixative as a final process.

His application methods were as varied as the black media he used, although generally he would tone the paper with ground charcoal before working with oiled charcoal. He stumped, scraped, erased, smudged and overworked the surface, in some cases using his fingers and possibly scraping back with a fingernail, as his prints are clearly visible on certain work. In later work he used black pastel in the top layers which is visible by its blue-black cast over the warmer tone of the underdrawing.

He had a brief interruption when called to serve in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Following the war he returned to Paris to work almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. His first album was published in 1879, entitled Dans le Reve (In Dream).

He married in 1880, and inspired by his wife Camille began to use pastels in his work. His paintings from this period display a confident use of colour and light, such as Rocks on the beach (c1883) (oil on canvas) and illustrates the solid grounding he had in colour media prior to his output of the pastels.

His first son Jean was born in 1886, but died at the age of six months. This plunged Redon into a “melancholy of the mind” which was to endure until the birth of his second son Ari in 1889.

In the early 1880s Redon was introduced to the writings of Flaubert, Baudelaire  and Edgar Allan Poe, which were to have a profound effect on his work.

In 1884 the publication of a cult novel, Rebours (Against Nature) whose protagonist was a collector of Redon’s work, was to bring his work to increased public awareness.

In 1890 Redon suffered a religious crisis, in part due to the suicide of his close friend Armand Clavaud, who had instructed and informed him in many aspects of natural history. This was followed by a serious illness, and it was after this time that he turned increasingly to pastels. His work transformed into an optimistic and colourful style, often inspired by mythological themes, and the many studies of floral still life were greatly admired by Henri Matisse, among others.

His techniques in colour pastel developed dramatically through his career. Early work was often applied over noirs, using them in the same way as a painter prepares an underpainting. At a later date he experimented with many ways of application including wetting the pastel and using brushes, while continuing with his repertoire of stumping, incising etc. which he already employed. Initially he continued to use balsamic fixative, but later changed to a non-yellowing type and gradually became more sparing in its use. Towards the end of his life he used it rarely, and never on the final layer, thus preserving the colour and luminosity of the pastel pigment.

He died in 1916, and while he was then a distinguished artist in his field, he remained until the end a very private person.

Of his drawing he said;

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