Odilon Redon
1840–1916French · Symbolism 1880–1910
He spent twenty-five years working almost entirely in black — charcoal drawings and lithographs of floating eyes, spiders with human faces, severed heads — and then, in his fifties, turned to colour and never went back.
Formation
From Bordeaux, sent as a sickly child to live on a family estate in isolation, which he later identified as the source of everything. He trained briefly under an academic painter, then learned etching from Rodolphe Bresdin and, crucially, studied botany and anatomy with the naturalist Armand Clavaud, who introduced him to microscopic organisms and to Darwin. The hybrid creatures in his work come from that as much as from imagination.
Technique
Two distinct careers. The noirs are charcoal on paper, worked with stumps and erasers into deep velvety blacks with forms emerging from indeterminate ground, and lithographs printed to preserve exactly that quality — he called them his blacks and insisted they were the most essential thing he did. From around 1890 he turned to pastel and oil, exploiting pastel's pure powdered pigment for an intensity that oil cannot match, layering and fixing repeatedly. The late flower pieces are pastel of an extraordinary saturation on toned paper.
The palette
Nothing, and then everything. In the noirs the palette is a single black with the paper doing the rest, and the tonal range is enormous within it. In the colour work he uses cadmium yellow and orange, cobalt and ultramarine, viridian, the lakes and cobalt violet, applied as unmixed powdered pigment so the colour is at full chroma. There is rarely any attempt at a coherent light source: colour floats, backgrounds are indeterminate fields, and objects hover without cast shadows.
Legacy
The Surrealists claimed him directly, and the dream image drawn with naturalistic precision is a device that runs from the noirs to Magritte and Ernst. Matisse and the Fauves took the colour. He is the clearest case in this atlas of an artist who worked out one language completely, abandoned it, and then did the same thing again in the opposite key.
Further reading: Redon (Basic Art) — Michael GibsonPalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Cerulean blue · Ultramarine · Cobalt violet · Chrome yellow · Cadmium yellow · Madder and the red lakes · Lead white · Cobalt blue