Odilon Redon: As in a Dream

by Hollein, Max

• ISBN13: 9783775718943
• ISBN10: 377571894X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-01
• Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag Gmbh & Co Kg

Summary

The French painter, draftsman and mystic, Odilon Redon, was already in his forties, an eminence grise, when a group of young colleagues asked him to the 1884 founding of the Societe des Independants. He was in his seventies when his work appeared in the 1913 Armory show, which woke American audiences to a new aesthetic. And while he lived only a few years longer, his work carried forward, not only in collections around the world, but in his influence on major artists including Cezanne, Degas, Gaugin and Matisse. In its darkness and abstraction, Redon's work remains exceptionally relevant today: his spiders, floating heads and glowing conch shells in near-empty frames could easily be contemporary. His figures and objects from the worlds of antiquity, Christianity and nature are often veiled in iridescent clouds of intense color, to enigmatic and mystical effect. In charcoal drawings and lithographs, Redon devoted himself to the human subconscious, with its fears and nightmares, and produced an urgent and eerie Symbolist oeuvre. This substantial retrospective underlines his central importance for an emergent Modernism. Redon is credited not just with changing the course of Impressionism, but with influencing artists as disparate as Duchamp, the Surrealists and Jasper Johns.

Table of Contents

"J'ai fait un art selon moi seal" : the exhibition	p. 15
Odilon Redon in his time	p. 27
The singularity of Odilon Redon's Charcoals	p. 43
Imagination and reality : Odilon Redon and photography	p. 51
Le fantastique reel : Redon's encounter with Edgar Allan Poe	p. 59
The dream as an artistic strategy	p. 71
Related dreams? : thoughts on Odilon Redon and Charles Baudelaire	p. 79
The secret of embryonic life - from the water drop to the micro-ocean	p. 87
From botany to belief : Odilon Redon and Armand Clavaud	p. 95
"Jeunes Peintres, mes amis" : Odilon Redon and the Nabis	p. 103
Allies in art : Odilon Redon, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Stephane Mallarme	p. 111
"Why a blue here and gold there?" - The golden cell : the significance and reception of color in the art of Odilon Redon	p. 124
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.