IWR Art – The Art of Odilon Redon

Internet Weekly Report – Art And Culture

The Art Of Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon [Bio 1840-1916] was an extraordinarily gifted and creative French Symbolist painter and printmaker.  His early prints were darker in nature, but his later artwork exploded with beautiful colors like a butterfly from his earlier gloomy cocoon. In short, I think Redon’s oil and pastel paintings are simply magnificent.

The Cyclops (1914)

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica

“French Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher of considerable poetic sensitivity and imagination, whose work developed along two divergent lines. His prints explore haunted, fantastic, often macabre themes and foreshadowed the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. His oils and pastels, chiefly still lifes with flowers, won him the admiration of Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colourist.”

Web Archives

Wikimedia Commons has the most accessible archive of Roden’s work.

Update 02/23/2008: History of Art: Odilon Redon has the largest collection of Roden’s work.

The Odilon Redon Web Site has some great images, but a lot of the links to other sites are malformed and you need to manually edit the URL, e.g.,  http://www.chez.com/odilon/odilon/jd.html

MoMA has a substantial collection of Roden’s work and this special Flash exhibit

Also, 20Six Web Site has multiple pages of Redon’s work, Bert C has a small set, but I couldn’t get a response The Athenaeum web server, which I’ll try later.

Prints and Lithographs

Here are three representative examples of his early work, and you can see why he was popular with the Surrealists.  He also published several great print albums: In The Dream (1879), To Edgar Allen Poe (1882),  Hommage To Goya (1885), The Night (1886) and the Apocalypse of St. Jean (1889).

Pastels And Oils
Here are what I consider his best color artwork available on the Internet.  Please click on the pictures to get the full sized image.

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