Art: Nightmares & Flowers

A whole generation before the Surrealists made a fad of the subconscious, an affable, frail, dreamy little Frenchman was putting his most fantastic nightmares on paper. Even his tradition-busting contemporaries the Impressionists thought his work was queer. Up to the time of his death (1916) he sold his pictures (if at all) for as little as $15 apiece. Today he is a collectors’ favorite, regarded by critics as one of the greatest painters of modern France. His name: Odilon Redon.

One Redon purchaser who got in on the ground floor was Chicago’s famed steelman and art-lover Martin A. Ryerson, who bought the first impressions of all Redon’s 323 lithographs from Redon’s widow in 1919 for the Art Institute of Chicago. The Institute now claims to have more Redons than any other museum in the world. Last week gallery-goers went to the Institute to see an exhibition of 19 more Redon charcoal drawings.

Drawn originally as illustrations for Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony, these shadowy, brooding fantasies in black & white had long lain unpublished in the collection of the famed French dealer Ambroise Vollard, had found their way to the U.S. following Vollard’s death in an automobile accident (TIME, July 31, 1939). This was their first public showing.

Typical products of Artist Redon’s weird, abstracted mind, they seldom depict recognizable incidents from Flaubert’s story. They crawl with strange, imaginary, amoebic organisms and flower forms, emaciated, corpselike beings, fantastic planetary convulsions, disembodied bits of human anatomy. In one an enormous human head suspended in space gazes broodingly over a dreary seascape. Another shows a devil clawing at a pot of stewing human skulls. Redon fans, admiring the artist’s meticulous drawing and the strange velvety sheen of his blacks, agreed last week that his nightmares had never been more vivid than these.

Odilon Redon just missed being born in the U.S. Son of a New Orleans Creole mother and a French father who went to America to make his fortune during the Napoleonic wars, Redon was born in 1840 just after his parents landed in Bordeaux. A sickly child in a fairly well-to-do family, he was allowed to dawdle unsuccessfully at his early school studies, got his real education from an eccentric botanist who whetted his appetite for writers like Flaubert, Baudelaire, Poe. In Paris he took up architecture, then sculpture, failed at both. A moody young man, he was drafted in the Franco-Prussian War, complained that while his exuberant companions in arms sang and laughed, he himself just got very tired.

Not until Redon was 35 did he find his best refuge from reality in charcoal drawing and lithography. He took no part in Paris’ gregarious Bohemia, knew intimately very few of the Left Bank great. Prim and methodical in his daily life, he worked continuously in a small parlor full of old-fashioned furniture and knickknacks, wore white cloth gloves while working, took an occasional evening off to drink tea with a small circle of intimate friends: the poet Mallarme, the composer Ernest Chausson, the decadent novelist Joris Karl Huysmans.

For his uneventful outward life, Painter Redon made up with his steamy imagination, drew and painted enigmatic, mystical scenes in which classical centaurs and chariots rubbed elbows with faded butterflies, human-head fish, buddhas, fetal monstrosities and demons. His colors had an eerie, somnambulistic look, like rainbows seen through sunglasses. The reds in his famous flower paintings had the flat, vaguely disturbing color of coagulated blood. Flowers looked to him like “half plant, half animal.”

Said Escapist Redon: “My art places us, like music, in a world indeterminate and ambiguous.”

Said his friend and critic Huysmans: “It is a nightmare transported into art.”