ODILON REDON: PRINCE OF DREAMS
But as anyone who has covered their eyes in terror knows, it doesn’t work; and many of Redon’s noirs depict the demons of the mind’s eye. Menacing profiles hide in rocks; flowers display strange faces; creatures seem part plant, part animal. In Primitive Being (c. 1875), a nude youth standing in a road bends to touch the severed head of a giant. In Cactus Man (1881), a head with long thorns all over it sprouts from a square box, apparently growing like a plant. The black hairy form of The Smiling Spider (1881) perches atop a gridlike landscape, its toothy grin at once menacing and inviting. Resting on only a few legs, the spider appears to stand on a checkerboard of cultivated fields; if so, it is truly enormous. Yet its ambiguous visage–at once confrontational and cuddly, fierce and cute–evokes contradictory emotions: this scary monster of childhood nightmares is almost humanly friendly as well.
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Redon worked in a time of great scientific ferment. Darwin’s theory of evolution was radically changing humans’ conception of themselves; challenging Christianity’s idea of man divinely created in God’s image, this view placed man firmly within nature, merely one of its products. At the same time scientists were uncovering new life forms (pictures of which were published in La Nature, a French periodical, copies of which are on view in this show) and there was also a fascination with other, more “primitive” societies, though regrettably the French often displayed citizens of such societies in cages. Redon, impressed by these displays, was of the opinion that “primitive” people were fascinating not only in themselves but as lower stages in the evolution toward Europeans.
Eye-Balloon (1878) reveals the artist’s interest in contemporary technology. A balloon in the shape of an eye, looking upward, carries a severed head in place of a gondola, floating over an almost featureless landscape. In Redon’s time balloons radically altered the view of the landscape by providing an aerial perspective–another stage, perhaps, in man’s evolution upward, toward the light. But the picture has another, deeper significance. For all Redon’s interest in nature, his gaze was mostly directed inward: what makes the earlier images so strong is the impression that these are things not seen before. The giant, disembodied eye given the power of flight announces the primacy of inner vision. The mind, divorced from time and space, is free to roam where it will; the child running in a landscape is no longer running away–he has the freedom to seek out, even to create, the sights he wishes to behold. Across the top of the eye in Eye-Balloon are long, straight dark hairs; eyelashes or the eyebrow perhaps, they not only give the eye a certain organic creepiness but separate it from everything else in the composition. The artist’s eye becomes all.
Redon’s shift to color beauties from black-and-white horrors may well have been influenced by his happier life, but it’s perhaps just as likely that his greater confidence in the power of his own vision, made explicit in Eye-Balloon, led him away from his brutes: if the eye can truly go anywhere, why not seek out gardens? Of course Redon painted some works in color almost from the beginning–many of the noirs use hints of color–and certain late pictures like The Cyclops (c. 1914) bring back his monsters. Still, his work underwent an extraordinary shift about 1890. Suddenly the pictures explode into color–colors that shine almost fluorescently, colors that recede into modest quietness.
Like some of the noirs, and most of the color pictures, this composition is divided into tiny self-sufficient worlds. Each flower takes a different visual form, is another kind of life; each must be seen on different terms. The painting seems a series of images unfolding in time, mirroring natural growth; looking at the picture is like entering a series of separate, parallel worlds. As Redon matured, the composition of his works carried less and less of their meaning.
Virtually every aspect of this exhibit, organized mainly by Art Institute curator Douglas W. Druick, is superb. Darkened rooms with spots on each individual work properly emphasize the delicate separateness of each work. The 184 pieces on view–drawings, prints, paintings, screens, even a chair with a Redon design–well represent his overwhelming achievement. The massive catalog places Redon’s work in the context of his life and of the many intellectual and artistic currents of his age. Every work is reproduced there, the color ones in color, the noirs with a hint of color in duotone.
