JOURNAL ARCHIVES
SPRING 2008
ODILON REDON (1840-1916)
Odilon Redon: before and after
SPRING 2008
THE FAMILY OF ODILON REDON
Portrait of Ari Redon. Odilon Redon. 1898. The Art Institute of Chicago.
I forsake the black more and more. Between us, it exhausted me a lot. Odilon Redon (1840-1916) in a letter to Emile Bernard (1895)
Odilon Redon and Camille Falte, his wife, had their first child, Jean, in May 1886. When Jean died the following November, the acutely sensitive and artistic Redon entered a prolonged period of depression and spiritual crisis. His melancholy further deepened during a serious illness in the mid-1890's.
His artwork from this ten year period (1886-1895) provides an intimate window into his healing, as he moves from macabre-themed charcoal sketches to mythological and floral works bathed in luminous color. Some art historians credit the birth of his second son Ari in 1889 as being an important factor in Redon's eventual recovery.
Mme Redon and Ari. Odilon Redon. Circa 1900.
Notes
Redon and Camille Falte married in 1880. By all accounts, it was an extremely stable and happy one. She was an active participant in his work, handling the details of merchants and the press on his behalf.
BEFORE AND AFTER
The two works by Odilon Redon which follow illustrate the transformation of his work following an illness and a spiritual crisis in the 1890's. The creation of the first piece closely followed the loss of his first child, Jean, in 1886.
The heart has its reasons. 1887. Museum of Modern Art, New York.The title is from Blaise Pascal's Pensées: Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas/The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.
Beatrice. 1897. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Beatrice is the legendary muse and great love of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. This is an account of a dream which followed his seeing her for the first time:
. . . In his arms it seemed to me that a person was sleeping, covered only with a crimson cloth; upon whom looking very attentively, I knew that it was the Lady of the Salutation, who had deigned the day before to salute me. And he who held her held also in his hand a thing that was burning in flames, and he said to me, "Behold thy heart."
