All oil paintings of Odilon Redon (20 Century, French,
Symbolism) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of Odilon Redon to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping.
1840-1916 • French • Painter / Printmaker • Symbolist
The sense of mystery is a matter of being all the time amid the equivocal, in double and triple aspects, and hints of aspects (images within images), forms which are coming to birth, or which will come to birth according to the state of mind of the observer.
Redon believed his own originality to be in fashioning beings that are "impossible according to the laws of possibility." Among his bizarre creatures were free-floating eyeballs (from the idea of an all-seeing eye of God); a boa constrictor whose uncoiling head becomes the figure of a man; severed heads; and weirdly preposterous creatures as in The Grinning Spider (1881), which seems to be winking as well as grinning. Redon was influenced by GOYA's prints and "Black Paintings" (e.g., Saturn Devouring His Children, 1819-23) and literature. Like MOREAU, Redon is sometimes labeled a "literary" SYM BOLIST: Edgar Allan Poe (translated in to French by BAUDELAIRE and Mallarme) inspired Redon. His use of masks, snake like monsters, detached heads, and dangerous women was characteristic of Symbolist painters. At first Redon worked only in black and white, primarily charcoal drawings and LITHOG RAPHY. He began experimenting with color in his paintings during the mid 1890s. After 1900, having survived illness and personal religious crisis, his work changed, becoming brighter and more spiritual. Vases of flowers in brilliant colors, often with anemones among them, was one of his themes, and these proved popular with American collectors after a number of Redon 's pictures were exhibited in the 1913 ARMORY SHOW.