One of the most original artists of his generation, Odilon Redon was a renowned French printmaker, draughtsman and painter, who only committed himself wholly to his artistic career in his 30s.
Born Bertrand-Jean Redon in Bordeaux, Redon took the name Odilon from his mother, Marie-Odile. He spent his childhood at his father’s estate in the Médoc, Peyrelebade, whose landscapes later provided the key source of artistic inspiration well into his adult life.
The young Redon showed many broad talents in fine art but also in music and literature. Initially setting out to train as an architect, in 1864 Redon instead entered the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, a short-lived and somewhat unhappy experience. A decisive influence on his decision to pursue an artistic career was the Bordeaux printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin, who taught him etching and lithography. After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, Redon settled in Paris and began producing what he called his Noirs: dreamlike charcoal drawings and lithographs including motifs such as floating eyeballs, spectral faces, and winged creatures. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, these works placed him at the heart of the Symbolist movement.
Redon’s literary associations were central to his production; throughout the 1880s and 1890s, he published 11 lithograph albums, some of which offered visual interpretations of important contemporary literature, such as Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). Though admired by writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Stéphane Mallarmé, Redon remained largely outside the mainstream, supported primarily by key individual collectors such as André Bonger in the Netherlands, Gabriel Frizeau in Bordeaux and Gustave Fayet at Fontfroide. He married Camille Falte in 1880, and a son, Jean, was born in 1886, but died in infancy, a tragedy which greatly affected the artist. Another son son Arï was born in 1889.
Around 1890, Redon began to incorporate limited colour into his Noirs, which had until this moment been wholly monochrome. Moving to pastel and oil, around 1900 he abandoned his Noirs and embraced luminous, vibrant colour, painting mythological scenes, portraits, and especially floral still lifes. The increasingly decorative essence of these works led to mural and screen commissions and brought his work to the attention of wider audiences, including the Nabis and Fauves, who greatly admired his innovations. In 1903 he received the Légion d’honneur, in 1904 his works were shown at the Salon d’Automne, and in 1913 he was prominently featured at the Armory Show in New York.
Redon died in Paris in 1916, leaving a vast corpus of work, including hundreds of drawings which are now in the Musée d’Orsay collections. A unique artist, his work influenced several art movements of the 20th century, including the Nabis, the Fauves and the Surrealists.