Odilon Redon. Perhaps Huysmans says it best:
"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium."
A Rebours (Against Nature / Against the Grain), J.K. Huysmans, 1884
Cactus Man |
- Odilon Redon (dot) net
- Odilon Redon (dot) com
- Bio of Odilon Redon
- An online gallery of Redon's Le Noirs/Blacks
- 'Oannes' by Redon
- Obsession
- The Complete Works of Odilon Redon
- Redon at the MOMA
- Another Redon Web Museum
- Museum Syndicate
- The Athenaeum
- Artcyclopedia
- Odilon Redon's works at Wikimedia
The Winged Man by Odilon Redon
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Cyclops by Odilon Redon
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Eye Balloon by Odilon Redon
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Spirit of the Forest by Odilon Redon
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Die Ursprunge by Odilon Redon
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Evocation by Odilon Redon
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Crying Spider by Odilon Redon
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Mystical Knight by Odilon Redon
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Smiling Spider by Odilon Redon