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Magical, Macabre Redon
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19942 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
1,426 Words |
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Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
The name of Odilon Redon first brings to mind vivid masses of flowers, such as in Bouquet of Poppies, collector Ian Woodner's first purchase. Woodner, an American architect and builder who had studied painting at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1930s, once said of this work:
The painting attracted me immediately but I couldn't understand why. As I began to live with it, the mystery slowly unfolded. I began to see the multitude of small flowers, almost imperceptible at first glance. The strong pyramidal structure then became clearer. I was struck by the transition between monumental forms and colors and the exquisite delicacy and fragility . . . I still feel it to be the best of my Redon collection.
Woodner added, exchanged, and upgraded his collection until he had gathered 206 works by Redon. As he did so, he also became fascinated by the French Symbolist's early work: drawings, charcoals, and lithographs black and mysterious, conjuring up haunting subjects on the borderline of nightmare and dream.
A current exhibition, at Lausanne's Foundation de l'Hermitage until September 21, 1992, carefully presents all the facets of the Woodner Collection, stored out of sight in New York since the collector's death in 1990 and shown infrequently.
Among the visitors to the handsome Palladian mansion in Lausanne have been a surprising number of young people, attracted precisely by Redon's more difficult, visionary, dark works. The artist's black oeuvre, les noirs as he called them, reveals him to be very much influenced by Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. Redon shared with his Symbolist contemporaries a fin-de-siecle fascination for the occult and the strange. He strove to do in his paintings what others were doing in their writings: to evoke the ineffable impressions and intuitions of man's inner life, and to convey the essence of another reality underlying the physical world--in his own words, "attempting to make the invisible visible."
Introspective Childhood
Some of his fascination may have come directly from a lonely, introspective childhood. Odilon Redon was born in 1840 in Bordeaux. His father, Bertrand Redon, had returned there from Louisiana, where he had managed to recoup a fortune and find a Creole wife. His parent's tales of a faraway land may have impressed the frail child, who grew up on a country domain filled with impressive trees.
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