Odilon Redon

1840-1916

Odilon Redon spent his first decades as an artist working almost entirely in black — charcoal and lithography, the 'noirs' he began producing in Paris after returning from the Franco-Prussian War. These brooding, dreamlike images of solitary eyes, hybrid creatures and floating heads gained a cult following once Joris-Karl Huysmans described them in his 1884 novel À rebours. Around the 1890s Redon largely abandoned black for pastel and oil, turning to luminous flowers, mythic and religious subjects — Buddha, Apollo, Pegasus — and eventually the great decorative panels commissioned in 1900–01 for the Château de Domecy, whose flattened space and colour owe much to Japanese screen painting. Born in Bordeaux in 1840 and trained briefly under Gérôme and Bresdin, he exhibited with the Impressionists and with Les XX, was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1903, and was given pride of place at the 1913 Armory Show. He died in Paris in 1916, remembered as a forerunner of Surrealism.