Opening this weekend at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Odilon Redon's Haunted Realm, an exhibition of phantasmagorical lithographs inspired by the writing of Gustav Flaubert. The show runs through January 14, 2007, in the museum's Gallery of Prints and Drawings.
Born in Bordeaux in 1840, Redon studied etching and lithography before moving to Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. He worked exclusively in black-and-white mediums such as charcoal, etching, and lithography until quite late in life, producing images ranging from the mystical to the macabre, inspired by myth, folklore, children's stories, archeology, and the writings of Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Edgar Alan Poe. He was also deeply interested in Darwin's radical new theory of evolution -- a topic explored in a fascinating essay by Barbara Larsen on Redon's early work.
In the 1890s, Redon turned to painting in oils, proving himself to be a remarkable colorist. He'd been known as a melancholy man, but after a religious crisis and a long illness he became an ebullient figure, creating lush paintings of flowers and dreamlike imagery from myth and folklore. Although he's generally known as a Symbolist painter, the Surrealist artists of the 20th century claimed Redon as an important forerunner. Today, his influence can still be seen in the work of visionary artists such as Mark Wagner and Erica Swadley.
The Redon images we've reproduced here are: Cactus Man and Spirit of the Forest (at the top), Beatrice, The Buddah, and The Cyclops. For more information on the artist, you'll find a good site (in both French and English) here. And I highly recommend MOMA's Odilon Redon: Beyond the Visible web page.
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