Symbolist who spent twenty years drawing in black — smiling spiders, floating eyes, charcoal creatures he called his noirs — then turned around 1890 to some of the most saturated colour in French art. The Surrealists later claimed him as an ancestor.
Odilon Redon was a French artist who spent the first half of his career drawing in black and the second half working in colour, and who is the central figure of Symbolist art. He was born at Bordeaux on 20 April 1840 and died in Paris on 6 July 1916.
For about twenty years from the mid-1870s he worked almost entirely in charcoal and lithography, on a body of work he called his noirs — his blacks. They are full of floating eyes, severed heads, spiders with human faces and single flowers growing out of nothing, drawn with the precision of a scientific illustration.
He was in his forties before anyone much noticed. The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans put Redon's drawings into the hands of the hero of À rebours in 1884, and the Symbolist writers adopted him as their painter.
From about 1890 he stopped using black and worked in pastel and oil, in colour so intense that the two halves of his career barely look like the same artist. He had more works in the 1913 Armory Show in New York than any other artist there.
Odilon Redon was born at Bordeaux on 20 April 1840. He was sent away as an infant to the family property at Peyrelebade, in the Médoc, and raised there by an uncle until he was about eleven.[1]
He was a sickly, solitary child, subject to epileptic seizures, and he spent his childhood alone in a flat landscape of vineyards and marshland. The isolation of those years is the thing every account of him returns to, and he wrote about it himself in his journal, À soi-même, published after his death.[2]
He began drawing early and was awarded a school prize for it at fifteen.
Redon's education was unusual and he owed most of it to three men who were not painting teachers in the ordinary sense.
The botanist Armand Clavaud, a friend from Bordeaux, gave him Darwin, Spinoza, Poe and Indian poetry, and showed him plant and animal life under a microscope. The microscopic organisms Redon saw there run straight into the drawings.[2]
His father made him study architecture in Paris, and he failed the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts. He then spent an unhappy period in the studio of the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who wanted him to draw from the model correctly and told him to shut his imagination up in a cage.
The teacher who mattered was Rodolphe Bresdin, an eccentric engraver living in poverty in Bordeaux, who taught Redon etching and, more importantly, that a print could be a world invented rather than observed. Lithography, the technique Redon used for his albums, was shown to him later by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.[3]
From about 1870 Redon settled in Paris and, for the next twenty years, worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithographic crayon. He called the results his noirs.[4]
The subjects have no precedent. A single eye rises into the sky like a balloon carrying a severed head. A spider has a grinning human face and ten legs, in the 1887 lithograph called The Smiling Spider. A plant sprouts a face at the top of its stem. A head lies on a plate. Nothing is explained and there is no narrative to attach it to.
What makes them work is the drawing. Redon rendered these things with the sober, patient attention of a natural-history illustrator, in a full range of greys, so the impossible object sits on the page with the authority of something observed.
He described the aim himself. The drawings were meant, he wrote, to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. Asked what they meant, he said that they inspire, and are not to be defined.
He published them in lithographic albums with literary titles. In the Dream came in 1879, To Edgar Poe in 1882, Origins in 1883 and Homage to Goya in 1885. Three separate series on Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony followed between 1888 and 1896.
Redon sold almost nothing for years. What changed his position was a novel.
In 1884 Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours, the book that defined French decadence, whose hero Des Esseintes shuts himself away with a collection of artificial pleasures. Among them are drawings by Redon, described at length. The novel was read by everyone in literary Paris, and Redon became the artist the Symbolist writers pointed to. The same book was doing the same job for Gustave Moreau, whose paintings of Salome it turned into icons of the movement.
1884 was a busy year. Redon presided over the founding of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, the exhibiting society set up with no jury at all, whose first salon is where Georges Seurat showed his huge Bathers at Asnières.
Stéphane Mallarmé became a friend. So did the composer Ernest Chausson and the poet Émile Verhaeren. The young painters of the Nabis group — Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis — treated him as a master rather than a contemporary.
Redon had epilepsy from childhood, and the seizures are part of why he was sent away from Bordeaux as an infant and kept in the country. He did not write about the illness directly, and it should not be used to explain the drawings, which he planned and executed with great deliberation over months.
What the childhood does explain is the habit. He spent years alone in a flat landscape with no company and no pictures, looking at clouds, water and plants, and he said afterwards that he had learned to see shapes in things that were not there. He painted at Peyrelebade every summer for more than twenty years. The family estate was divided in the 1890s, and the property was sold out from under him in 1897.
Around 1890 Redon largely stopped working in black. From then until his death he worked in pastel and oil, in colour of a saturation almost nobody else was using.
The subjects change with the medium. There are vases of flowers that appear to be lit from inside, portraits of women with closed eyes, chariots of Apollo, Buddhas, butterflies and shells. The strangeness does not go away, but it stops being frightening.
The clearest case is The Cyclops, painted around 1914. The one-eyed monster of the Odyssey peers over a flowering hillside at a sleeping nymph, in pinks and greens, and looks shy rather than dangerous. It is now at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
He explained the shift very little. His son Arï was born in 1889, after an earlier son had died in infancy in 1886, and the change in the work is usually dated to that, though Redon himself did not put it that way.
He also took on decorative commissions, painting rooms at the Château de Domecy in Burgundy from 1900 and the library of the Abbaye de Fontfroide, near Narbonne, in 1910 and 1911.
Redon was in his fifties before he had a real reputation and in his sixties before he had money. He showed at the Salon des Indépendants and with the Nabis, and by the 1900s French museums were buying.
In 1913 the Armory Show in New York introduced modern European art to the United States. Redon was represented by more works than any other artist in the exhibition, and American collectors bought heavily. His reputation in the United States dates from that show.
He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1903.
Odilon Redon died in Paris on 6 July 1916, aged seventy-six. His son Arï was serving at the front, and Redon had spent his last two years anxious about him.
His journal, À soi-même, covering the years from 1867 to 1915, was published in 1922 and remains the main source for what he thought he was doing.
The Musée d'Orsay holds the major French collection, including the decorative panels painted for the Château de Domecy. The library at the Abbaye de Fontfroide is still in place.
In the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York both hold strong groups, a consequence of the buying that followed the Armory Show. The Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands has The Cyclops.
Redon drew the inside of a head and gave it the finish of scientific illustration, thirty years before the Surrealists made that a programme. André Breton's generation claimed him as an ancestor, and the claim holds: the floating eye and the human-faced spider are the first modern images of that kind that are not jokes, allegories or illustrations of a text.
He is also the rare artist whose late work is a genuine second career rather than a decline. The pastels of the 1900s, in colour that has no obvious source in French painting before them, were taken up by Matisse and the Fauves, so Redon fed two movements that had almost nothing else in common.
Born at Bordeaux on 20 April.
Is sent as an infant to the family property at Peyrelebade in the Médoc and raised there by an uncle.
Returns to Bordeaux to live with his parents after about ten years in the country.
Wins a school prize for drawing at fifteen.
Meets the botanist Armand Clavaud, who gives him Darwin, Spinoza and Poe and shows him microscopic organisms.
Is made to study architecture by his father and fails the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts.
Spends an unhappy period in the studio of the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris.
Is taught etching and lithography by the engraver Rodolphe Bresdin at Bordeaux.
Serves in the Franco-Prussian War.
Settles in Paris and begins working almost entirely in charcoal and lithographic crayon.
Publishes his first lithographic album, In the Dream.
Marries Camille Falte, a young woman from Réunion.
Holds his first solo exhibition, of charcoal drawings, at the offices of a Paris newspaper.
Publishes the album To Edgar Poe, including the eye rising as a balloon carrying a severed head.
Publishes the album Origins, on evolution and the emergence of life.
Joris-Karl Huysmans puts Redon's drawings into the hands of the hero of the novel À rebours, and Redon becomes the painter of the Symbolist writers.
Publishes Homage to Goya.
Shows with the Impressionists at their eighth and last group exhibition. His first son, Jean, dies in infancy.
Publishes the lithograph The Smiling Spider, a spider with a grinning human face and ten legs.
Publishes the first of three series of lithographs on Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
His son Arï is born.
Begins to abandon black for pastel and oil.
Holds a large retrospective at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris.
Completes the third and last series on The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
Begins the decorative paintings for the dining room of the Château de Domecy in Burgundy.
Is made a knight of the Legion of Honour.
A room is devoted to his work at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Paints the library of the Abbaye de Fontfroide, near Narbonne, over two years.
Has more works in the Armory Show in New York than any other artist, and American collectors buy heavily.
Peyrelebade, the property where he was raised, is sold when the family estate is divided.
Dies in Paris on 6 July, aged seventy-six, with his son Arï serving at the front.
His journal, À soi-même, covering 1867 to 1915, is published.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds a large exhibition of Redon alongside Gustave Moreau and Rodolphe Bresdin.
A major retrospective, Prince of Dreams, tours from the Grand Palais in Paris.
Painting · Redon's late color
A one-eyed giant rises over a purple ridge and looks down at a woman asleep in a bank of flowers. Odilon Redon painted it in oil around 1914, at the end of a working life that had begun in charcoal and black ink. It hangs at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the Netherlands.
Drawing · Redon's late color
A small boat with a tall pale sail carries two seated figures in white, and a darker third shape at the stern, across colored water under a sky broken into patches of orange, blue and white. Odilon Redon drew it in pastel around 1903 and sold it to Charles Waltner in Paris in February 1904. It is at the Art Institute of Chicago, which bought it in 1990.
Drawing · Redon's late color
A soft brown shape fills the lower half of the sheet, and flowers crowd the rest of it. Odilon Redon drew the pastel in 1906 and called it Ophelia, after the young woman in William Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns. It was given to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973.
Drawing · Redon's late color
A young woman in profile sits at the right of a large sheet while two thirds of it is given over to flowers. Odilon Redon drew her in pastel in 1910; she was Violette Heymann, niece of the Paris collector Marcel Kapferer, who owned the work until 1926. The Cleveland Museum of Art bought it that year and still holds it.
Print · The noirs
An eyeball the size of a balloon floats above a dark plain, rigged with lines that run down to a small platform carrying a head. Odilon Redon drew it on stone in 1882 as the first of six lithographs he dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art both hold impressions.
Met · 1884
Both were founders of the Societe des Artistes Independants in 1884 - Redon presiding, Seurat showing the Salon-rejected Bathers at Asnieres at its first exhibition.
Art & literary movement · circa 1860–1910
Redon worked in charcoal and lithography for years before turning to colour in the 1890s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art names him among the older generation who established Symbolist painting.
A French artist, born at Bordeaux in 1840 and died in Paris in 1916. He worked almost entirely in charcoal and lithography until about 1890 and in colour afterwards, and he is the central figure of Symbolist art. His images of floating eyes, human-faced spiders and severed heads have no precedent in European painting.
The charcoal drawings and lithographs he made from about 1870 to 1890, which he called his blacks. They show impossible things: an eye rising into the sky as a balloon, or a plant with a face at the top of its stem. Redon rendered them with the patient precision of a natural-history illustration, which is what makes them convincing.
He did not explain it clearly. From about 1890 he worked in pastel and oil in extremely saturated colour, and the subjects turned to flowers, closed-eyed women, Buddhas and butterflies. The change is usually dated to the birth of his son Arï in 1889, after an earlier son died in infancy in 1886, though Redon himself did not put it that way.
Through a novel. In 1884 Joris-Karl Huysmans described Redon's drawings at length in À rebours, whose hero collects them, and the book was read by everyone in literary Paris. The Symbolist writers took Redon up as their painter, and Stéphane Mallarmé became a friend.
No, he died in 1916, ten years before the Surrealist movement began, but André Breton's generation claimed him as an ancestor and the claim holds. Redon drew the contents of a head with the finish of scientific illustration decades before that became a programme.
He had more works in the 1913 Armory Show in New York — the exhibition that introduced modern European art to the United States — than any other artist represented there. American collectors bought heavily, and his reputation in the United States dates from it.
Met · 1884
Both were founders of the Societe des Artistes Independants in 1884 - Redon presiding, Seurat showing the Salon-rejected Bathers at Asnieres at its first exhibition.
Associated with · 1870
Redon worked in charcoal and lithography for years before turning to colour in the 1890s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art names him among the older generation who established Symbolist painting.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Odilon Redon and their work.
Official record used to verify names, dates, institutional details, or other factual information on this page.
Reference entry on the noirs, the Symbolist connection and the late pastels.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Odilon Redon page.
Reference article cross-checked for the dates, the lithographic albums, the teachers and the shift to colour.
Reference article used to confirm that Redon was the most heavily represented artist in the 1913 exhibition.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Odilon Redon page.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Odilon Redon. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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