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Friday, February 4, 2011

Artistic Influences: Odilon Redon


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
Some Odilon Redon Links
Some samples of Odilon Redon's work:

Redon winged-man
The Winged Man by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon.cyclops
Cyclops by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon.eye-balloon
Eye Balloon by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon spirit-forest
Spirit of the Forest by Odilon Redon

and...

Oodilon Redon - Die Ursprünge
Die Ursprunge by Odilon Redon

and...

Evocation Odilon Redon
Evocation by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon crying-spider
Crying Spider by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon mystical-knight
Mystical Knight by Odilon Redon

and...

Redon smiling-spider
Smiling Spider by Odilon Redon