Odilon Redon’s Dark Humor and Darker Worlds

Getty’s new exhibition Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions (on view through October 18) celebrates French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s unique artistic worlds—late 19th-century dreamscapes filled with mysterious figures, floating eyes, an abundance of shadowy spaces, and exuberant bursts of color. His work is also sometimes funny, even if the humor is pointedly dark.

We recently sat down with the exhibition’s curator, Danielle Canter, from the Getty Museum’s Department of Drawings, and asked her to tell us about six pieces that reflect Redon’s singular vision. She reveals how his rich cultural life directly inspired his very personal art: he loved to hunker down with books of poems, peer at plants under a microscope with a botanist friend, and host musical events in his home.

Literature

Danielle Canter: Redon often responded to the novels and poetry he read by making art. In the macabre but playful drawing The Battle of the Bones, he took his inspiration and title from a passage of a poem written by a friend, Maurice Bouchor.

The poem describes two men who fight to the death over their lover, but after they are dead and buried, they crawl out of their graves and return to the scene of the crime. They eat her food, make a mess of things, and then continue to fight.

Redon chose to capture this particular moment late in the battle when one skeleton has been knocked to the ground and the other has been cut in two. Both of them keep their arms raised as they continue to fight. We think of Redon as very dark, but there is sometimes a real sense of humor to his work.

What I find most incredible about this drawing is that the skeletons are composed of the reserve, which is the blank part of the paper. Redon achieved this through the careful placement and then removal of rich black charcoal. The effect is that the skeletons are really emerging out of the darkness.

Redon was playing with ideas of life and death and the afterlife. By placing the skeletons in this dark void, he was able to take inspiration from this poem but still create something that could be read in various ways. I love this idea of skeletons at play, moving through the world.

The Eye

Canter: The eyeball is a continuous motif in Redon’s work; you see it over and over again in the exhibition. He was very interested in vision—what you could see by closely observing the world around you—the anatomical eye, but also a more spiritual vision. In Everywhere Eyeballs Are Aflame, the eye is separated from its body, looking beyond what we can perceive toward something perhaps more menacing or more mystical.

At times these images of eyes are more subtle, as in Head within an Aureole. In this drawing a severed head appears to float at the center of a halo of dark charcoal flecked with this beautiful, bright blue pastel, giving you the effect of an eyeball suspended in an amorphous space.

Botany

Canter: Redon made Day, a drawing of a tree, shortly after the death of his friend and mentor, the botanist Armand Clavaud. The two men shared a love of plant life and spent time together observing nature and looking at tiny life forms through the lens of a microscope.

I love this tree. At first glance it looks so normal compared to many of the other works in the show. It’s not until you get closer that you see floating amorphous forms surrounding the sheet and realize something odd is going on here.

Redon was interested in the idea of things nearly imperceptible to the eye, and these floating shapes look like the microbial shapes you would see through a microscope. At the same time, those forms could be the scattering of seeds or the plant life you see in a forest. We don’t know, and that’s the fun part.

Clavaud was also an illustrator and someone with broad interests in the world who introduced Redon to Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Darwin, Hindu poetry, and all sorts of texts that he might not have been exposed to otherwise. He helped Redon discover new ways of seeing, which is really what I find represented in this series.

Day reflects the strange combination of imagery you would see in a dream. Throughout Redon’s work you often see the idea of a doorway or portal. Here, we are inside a dark room, and we can see out a window to this beautiful flourishing tree in the sunlight. It’s almost as if we’re gazing from our world into something beyond, which is a theme that runs throughout the exhibition.

A love of nature, in particular plants and flowers, was continuously present in Redon’s art. Until his dying days he created beautiful depictions of flowers cut from his own garden, as in Vase of Flowers.

Music

Canter: Redon’s passions extended to the world of music. He hosted musical events in his home, attended concerts, and played the violin and piano. He grew up in a home where there was always music. Music is rarely visible in Redon’s art but may be reflected in the symphonic way he used color.

In his pastel drawing Orpheus, Redon employed a beautiful rainbow of color to depict the legendary musician and poet from Greek mythology. Here he rendered the suspended head of Orpheus through a simple outline, but beneath him is a field of flowers exploding with pure color; the flowers seem more like fireworks than actual blooms. You can imagine Redon with a full palette of pastel colors in front of him, doing one stroke of each to get this incredibly colorful effect.

We often think of Redon as a very independent and singular artist, but what I hope people will understand from the show is that he was strongly influenced by the cultural environment of late 19th-century France and the greater world around him. He really was a sponge. He took in so much that was around him, whether it be literature, music, or science, but was able to express this in art through his own personal vision.