The Romantic Paradoxes of Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (1840-1916), though not as celebrated as his Impressionist contemporaries, has always inspired respect and admiration. His numerous friends included poets, composers, and other artists, among them Degas, Monet, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, as well as composers Claude Debussy and Ernest Chausson. Music was a vital avocation for Redon, who described himself as having been "born on a sound wave." Chausson, a close friend, was later to characterize the painter as "an incomparable musician and excellent pianist."

Odilon Redon, Roger and Angelica, c. 1910; pastel, with wiping, stumping, and incising, on paper, mounted on canvas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.

The first time I remember seeing Redon's art, I was in high school. Music seemed to surge out of his pastel, Roger and Angelica (1910), inspiring and filling me with both awe and questions—indeed, so many that I determined to find out the answers. It was in the process of doing so, I think, that I made the decision to become an art historian. The pursuit became a lifelong obsession.

There were not many works by Redon to be seen in New York in those days, but now, we all have the opportunity to see more than 130 of this French Symbolist's works at the Museum of Modern Art. The ongoing exhibition, "Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon," is made possible by the gift of more than 100 of his paintings, drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and illustrated books made to the Modern in 2000 by the Ian Woodner Family Collection.

Redon's oeuvre and life embody the notion of the Romantic paradox. He worked almost exclusively in black and white for the first five decades of his life, and then burst into astonishing color for the final two. He created monsters and hybrids so bizarre that they foreshadowed Surrealism (Marcel Duchamp later acknowledged him as a major influence), but was by all accounts a well-adjusted bourgeois.

The paradoxes go on and on, from literal ones, such as drawings of Baudelaire's oxymoronic "black sun of melancholy," to Redon's assertions that his mysterious art stemmed from nature and the unconscious, but demanded the utmost control. Black and white, light and darkness, and the forces of good and evil combat one another in the imagination of the artist, and on the battlefields of his canvases.

Already in the first room of the exhibit, one is introduced to many of Redon's leitmotifs, which will recur in one form or another throughout his life. Next to an 1866 graphite copy of a Holbein hang depictions of women or horsemen alone in rocky, barren landscapes, bare trees, a centaur, and a severed head (of St. John) matter-of-factly lying on a platter.

On the far wall are six little-known, infrequently exhibited early oil paintings (mostly from the 1870s). Except for one of a fishing boat (1875), they all show barren landscapes, emphasizing clouds and rocks, suggestive of the anthropomorphic shapes he envisioned, and wrote about in his journal. Not at all colorful, civilized, and outgoing like works of his Impressionist contemporaries, these portray instead solitude, untamed country, and the void.

Odilon Redon; Eye-Balloon, 1878; various charcoals, with stumping, erasing, and incising, heightened with traces of white chalk, on yellow-cream wove paper altered to a pale golden tone; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Larry Aldrich, 1964.

The final room of the exhibition recapitulates the first one, with its small Delacroix-influenced paintings of small figures, boats, windows, heads, and a centaur. (In his journal, Redon tells of an entire day he spent following Delacroix through Paris.)

Here in a central position on the wall, Roger and Angelica again calls out to me. Ablaze with color and light, the operatic pastel contains many of the artist's lifelong obsessions. Like Wagner (with whom the Symbolists yearned to be linked, even using the term "Wagnerian painting"), Redon went to a literary source, in this case the Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto's epic poem, Orlando Furioso. However, he employed the story simply as a springboard to his imagination, just as he used nature as a catalyst.

Ariosto relates how Roger, flying on his hippogryph (half horse, half gryphon), catches sight of Angelica, who is chained to a rock and about to be devoured by a sea monster. The sight of the comely maiden fills Roger with pity (and desire), and he attempts to kill the monster with his lance. Failing that, he manages to daze him with a blinding light, reflected off the magic shield he carries. Ariosto compares the light to another sun entering the sky.

Redon depicts this moment, but not literally. Rather, he uses the story to free associate, employing many of the themes (as Wagner used leitmotifs) that obsessed him all his life. Angelica, representing innocence, surrounded by flowers inside a rock resembling a human face, is Eve in the Garden of Eden. She also represents fertility, suggested by the sexual allusion to being devoured.

Pregnancy might be hinted at in the vague, hidden form of a pregnant woman between Roger and the rock. More paradoxes appear: good-evil, light-darkness, innocence-sexuality, strength-helplessness, and male-female. The ecstatic blue, purple, green, and pink colors, illumined by a bolt of light, overpower the darkness, and joy triumphs. Winged horse, nude maiden, rock, sea, skies, and monster all belong to Redon's repertoire of Wagnerian leitmotifs, repeated over and over in the rooms in between the first and last one.

Redon had performed music with Chausson at fin-de-siècle salons where many of the participants championed new music, especially that of Wagner and Berlioz. The poet Mallarmé included him in his "Tuesday evenings" (les mardis), where Debussy often made appearances. Indeed, I would suggest that Debussy's music is far closer to Redon's art than it is to Impressionism.

The show is beautifully arranged; lithographs and drawings are exhibited in the series for which they were intended. These include three versions of portfolios devoted to Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony, the Homage to Goya, images from In the Dream, Origins, and To Edgar Poe.

Odilon Redon; The Spider, 1887; lithograph on chine appliqué; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mrs. Bertram Smith Fund, 1956.

Redon's monsters are generally disarmingly friendly, contrary to his contemporary J. K. Huysmans's description, where he said they "provoked bad dreams," and create a "new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium." The smiling, human-headed spider, for example, is an innocent, as are his centaurs, cyclops, and other assorted, almost silly-looking creatures. They are more prisoners than attackers. Here Redon comes closer to Blake and Goya (one writer referred to him as a French Blake), in his belief that lack of freedom, rather than evil, causes monstrosities.

Like Blake too, Redon refused to define and delimit his art, insisting that his role was to "open a small door onto mystery." Like Mallarmé, his art "suggests, instead of defining."

The exhibition illuminates how one artist spent decades exploring the color black, hibernating, as it were, until he finally emerged like a butterfly from the cocoon, like flowers from buds, or a baby from the womb. These were Redon's own images of color and light, as well as darkness. "Black," he once said, is the "color of youth." He, like Monet, in his later years, "did not go gentle into that good night," but used brilliant colors, in his rage against "the dying of the light."

"Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon" is on view at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street) through January 23. Hours are Wednesday-Monday, 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Friday, 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. The museum is closed on Tuesday. Admission for Juilliard students with an ID is free at all times. (On Friday from 4-8 p.m., it is free for everyone.)

NOTE: A special program of French songs and poetry related to Redon will be offered on Saturday, December 3, from 2-4 p.m. in the museum's Titus Theater 2. Three Juilliard singers and two pianists will be among the performers (Brenda Rae, Michael Kelly, and Sasha Cooke, as well as Paul Kwak and Yewon Lee). It is free of charge, with museum admission (which is free for Juilliard students).

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.