Form and Gesture: Basic Shapes and fundamental form - Research point

Odilon Redon

Redon was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1840 and died in 1916, a leading artist of the French Symbolist Movement, an artistic movement expressing mystical ideas, emotions and states of mind,

Redon was a painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist, and an avid reader of Decadent Era authors Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and Flaubert. In his youth he spend much of his time in solitude, and his early work was influence by his unhappy childhood and his participation in the war of 1870-71.

He later overcame this, moving on to pastels and oils and his art became radiant in colour and joyful in the subject matter for which he is better known.

From 1870 to 1890, Redon, created predominantly black artworks that he called “his Noirs” using charcoal and lithography, as he found black to be the most effective mean of expressing his feelings and his imagination. A master of the ‘chiaroscuro’, the lights and shadows, he produced no more Noirs after 1900.

Redon’s Noirs were full of atmosphere, and his main aim was to evoke the mystical and the emotional, not the reproduction of the visual reality of his subject matter. When describing his artistic philosophy, Redon wrote: “It is only after making an effort of will to produce a meticulous depiction of a blade of grass, a stone, a branch, or a bit of old wall, that I feel almost tormented to create something imaginary”

The image below is one of a collection of lithographs that Redon made to illustrate the Gustave Flaubert book “the Temptation of Saint Anthony”, which is characterized by imaginary and phantasmal characters to illustrate an intense religious and moral critique. In the collection Redon transposes certain images of the text into black and white marks on paper, each one captioned with a direct quote from Flaubert’s book, describing the scene being illustrated.” (S. Eisenman, the Temptation of Saint Redon, Biography 25).

The image depicts Ammonaria, the virgin who suffers martyrdom in Saint Anthony’s hallucinations, and Redon creates tones, light and shadows to describe a strong, powerful and cruel scene. The contrast between the darkness of Ammonaria, with her long hair around her body and the light on the side of her face, hand and leg, make a very dramatic portrayal of her martyrdom. And the contrast between the light and shadows of column and the lines across the floor create an angry, dramatic and atmospheric work of art.

References

Robert Cumming, 2015, Art Visual History, Penguin Random House

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/odilon-redon-2243

http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/black-is-the-most-essential-color-odilon-redons-noirs/

https://wildedecadence.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/presentation-odilon-redon-and-the-temptation-of-saint-anthony/