REDON, Odilon

Featured Paintings in Detail

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(Mythological Painting) 

REDON, OdilonPegasus and the Hydra1907 Oil  oil on cardboard, 47 x 63 cmRijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo

REDON, OdilonThe Black Pegasus1909-1910 Oil on canvas, 50.3 x 61 cm   Private collection

REDON, OdilonMuse On Pegasus1900 Oil on panel , 30.3 x 22.9 cm Private collection

REDON, OdilonWhite Pegasus1908Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 50.2 cm Private collection

REDON, OdilonPegasus 1900pastel, 25.3 x 31.5 cm Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington

REDON, OdilonApollo's Chariotcirca 1907-1908 oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81.2 cm  Musée d'Orsay, Paris

REDON, OdilonApollo's Chariot1908 Oil on canvas  Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Staatliche Museen zu, Berlin

REDON, OdilonApollo's Chariot1912oil on canvas, 99.7 x 74.9 cm The Musuem of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the Ian Woodner Family Collection, 2000

REDON, OdilonThe Chariot of Apollo 1905–16 Oil on canvas, (66 x 81.3 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

REDON, OdilonApollo's Chariot1905-1914 Oil embellished with pastel on canvas,  91.5 x 77 cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The present pastel is one of the highpoints of the decorative period (1907-10) in Redon's work. The sun-god Apollo, who was nicknamed "the shining one," is not directly visible himself in the picture but is probably understood to be present in the beam of light on the right-hand edge of the picture. The reflection of this light on the horses pulling his chariot conveys its intensity.

REDON, OdilonThe Birth of Venus 1912Ooil on canvas Private collection

REDON, OdilonThe Birth of Venus1912Pastel on buff colored paper, 83 x 64 cm Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

REDON, OdilonThe Birth Of Venus1912Oil on canvas, 143.2 x 62.5 cm Museum Of Modern Art

REDON, OdilonThe Birth of Venus 1910Oil on paper, mounted on cradled panel, 25.4 x 33 cm  Private collection

REDON, OdilonThe Birth of Venus 1912Ooil on canvas Private collection

REDON, OdilonPandora1914Oil on canvas, 143.5 x 62.2 cmMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Between 1908 and 1914, Redon was repeatedly drawn to represent the mythic beauties Venus, Andromeda, and Pandora. Here, he depicts Pandora—the exquisite woman fashioned from clay by the god Vulcan and sent to earth by Jupiter—as a graceful nude amid a profusion of flowers. Her innocence still intact, Pandora cradles in her arms the box that, when opened, will unleash all the evils destined to plague mankind, thereby bringing to an end the legendary Golden Age of humanity.

REDON, OdilonPandora1858/1916Pastel and charcoal on board, 29.1 × 22.1 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

REDON, OdilonPandora1910-1912Oil on canvas, 143.5 x 62.9 cmNational Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Collection

REDON, OdilonCentaurs 1910Oil on panel, 30.2 x 27 cm  Private collection

REDON, OdilonCentaur1895–1900 Pastel on canvas, 73 x 60.3 cm  Museum Fine Arts, Boston

Romantic and literary in his interests, Redon was attracted by the ambiguous and the mythological. In his work, he aimed to raise “the spirit into the realms of mystery, into the anxiety of the unresolved, and into the delicious world of uncertainty.” Pastel, with its rich but subdued colors and chalky texture was Redon’s preferred medium for his often otherworldly images. The centaur, a mythological creature with a man’s torso attached to a horse’s body, appears frequently in his work.

REDON, OdilonFight of the Centaurs1910 Watercolor, ink, and conté crayon on paper 17.8 x 25.3 cmMuseum of Modern Art, New York

REDON, OdilonAndromeda 1912Oil on canvas Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock

REDON, OdilonAndromeda 1907 Oil on cardboard,  22.86 x 28.58 cm Villa Flora, Winterthur

REDON, OdilonLeda and the Swan-Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paperPrivate collection

REDON, OdilonOannes 1904Oil on canvas,   64 x 53.5 cm Private collection

REDON, OdilonIcarus 1890 Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 52.1 x 38.1 cmPola Museum of Art, Hakone

REDON, OdilonOrpheus 1903-1910 pastel , 27.56 x 22.25 cm Cleveland Museum of Art 

According to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, after the poet and musician Orpheus was brutally killed by Maenads, his severed head--still singing--floated down the River Hebrus to the Mediterranean, and came to rest on the shores of Lesbos, where a shrine was built in his honor. Orpheus’s lyre was carried to heaven by the Muses, and placed among the stars. Rather than focusing on the macabre aspect of the myth, Redon’s pastel is a dreamlike interpretation of the theme. Transcending the life of the body, Orpheus’s head floats through a glittering, ethereal landscape, his song uniting with the harmony of the universe

REDON, OdilonThe Cyclops 1914Oil on canvas,  64 x 51 cm Kröller-Müller Museum

In this painting, the Cyclops Polyphemus spies on the sleeping Nereid Galathea from behind a tall mountain. The one-eyed giant’s love remains unrequited, as Galathea prefers the river god Acis. The unnaturally large eye is the most conspicuous part of the painting. In Redon’s work, the eye is often an all controlling, independent creature, a symbol of the human soul and of the mysterious, unknown inner world.The menace of the giant, or rather of the eye, that spies the naked woman, is reinforced by the unusual bright colours. With this personal, dreamlike depiction of a theme from the realm of the Greek gods, Redon has painted one of the masterpieces of symbolist art.

REDON, Odilon, Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

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Dream world

The work of Redon portrays a dream world, inhabited by fairies, monsters, spirits and other fantasy figures. This makes him typically representative of symbolism, an art movement in the late 19th century with a strong leaning towards the subconscious, the extraordinary and the inexplicable.

Bertrand-Jean Redon better known as Odilon Redon was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. Odilon was a nickname derived from his mother, Odile.

Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school. At age 15, he began formal study in drawing but on the insistence of his father he switched to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he would later

study there under Jean-Leon Gerome.

Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. However, his artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-

Prussian War.

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of

lithographs, titled Dans le Reve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who

collected Redon's drawings.

In the 1890s, he began to use pastel and oils, which dominated his works for the rest of his life.